For our 9th Anniversary, we wanted a coffee that felt nothing like an everyday release. Something loud, ridiculously fruit-forward, a little nostalgic, and genuinely interesting enough that the coffee itself could live up to everything we built around it.

Enter Tropical Juicebox.

This is a Purple Caturra from Finca Monteblanco in Huila, Colombia, taken through a tropical co-fermentation process that turns the fruit dial all the way up without losing what makes it great coffee.

In the cup, we’re getting huge notes of pineapple, mango, coconut, starfruit, juicy sweetness and hibiscus wrapped around a sweet, vibrant cup.

It sounds wild.

It drinks even wilder.

But underneath all that fruit is a seriously well-produced specialty coffee, and that’s the part of the story worth digging into.

WHAT DOES TROPICAL JUICEBOX ACTUALLY TASTE LIKE?

Let’s start with the part that matters whether you know what Brix means or couldn’t care less.

The easiest way to describe Tropical Juicebox is exactly what the name suggests.

Tropical fruit juice meets a really clean, sweet cup of coffee.

The first thing that jumps out is ripe tropical fruit. Pineapple and mango are the obvious heavy hitters, with a juicy, almost candy-like sweetness running underneath them.

As the cup opens up, it gets more interesting. There’s a softer coconut character, bright starfruit-like acidity and a floral hibiscus quality that keeps everything from becoming one-dimensional.

And that matters.

This isn’t supposed to drink like somebody dumped tropical syrup into your coffee.

It’s still coffee.

It’s just coffee with the fruit dial turned way, way up.

Hot, it’s explosive and aromatic. As it cools, those flavors begin separating out and the cup becomes even more expressive.

If you’re normally the person who lets a pour-over sit around for ten minutes before finishing it, this is one where that actually works in your favor.

Finca Monteblanco sits in the Acevedo area of Huila, one of Colombia’s most celebrated coffee-growing regions.

The farm is operated by third-generation coffee producer Rodrigo Sánchez Valencia, whose work with Purple Caturra and controlled fermentation has become an important part of Monteblanco’s identity.

And this isn’t simply a great Colombian coffee with an unusual processing name slapped on it.

The process is a huge part of why Tropical Juicebox tastes the way it does.

COFFEE NERD MODE: WHAT THE HELL IS A TROPICAL CO-FERMENT? 🤓

This is where things get fun.

At Monteblanco, the tropical fermentation process begins before the harvested coffee even enters the equation.

A mother culture is developed using microorganisms including Lactobacillus and Saccharomyces cerevisiae.

Tropical fruits are introduced to that culture along with natural sugars, creating a controlled fermentation environment.

Published descriptions of Monteblanco’s tropical process include fruits such as pineapple, cholupa, gulupa and passion fruit, with ingredients including molasses and cane sugar helping support fermentation.

That culture develops for roughly 190 hours while measurements including sugar concentration and acidity are monitored.

Then comes the coffee.

Freshly harvested Purple Caturra cherries are selected and sorted before being fermented with the prepared tropical culture.

Depending on the exact protocol for the lot, that secondary fermentation can continue for approximately 150 additional hours, again with measurements such as Brix and pH being monitored.

That is an enormous amount of intentional processing.

And intentional is the important word.

This isn’t just somebody throwing fruit into a barrel with coffee and hoping something interesting happens.

The goal is to create a specific fermentation environment using cultivated microorganisms, controlled sugar concentrations, monitored acidity, timed fermentation stages and careful drying.

That’s the difference between fermentation as experimentation and fermentation developed into a repeatable processing technique.

WHY PURPLE CATURRA?

Purple Caturra is an unusual Caturra selection found at Finca Monteblanco. Instead of ripening to the familiar bright red associated with many coffee cherries, these cherries develop a deep purple coloration.

More importantly for fermentation, Monteblanco has found Purple Caturra particularly useful because of its high sugar concentration.

Sugar content in coffee cherries can be measured in degrees Brix. Those sugars become part of the environment microorganisms work within during fermentation, which makes the starting material especially important when you’re trying to control a process like this.

Really sweet coffee cherries give the fermentation team a hell of a playground to work with.

WHAT DOES CO-FERMENTATION ACTUALLY CHANGE?

Fermentation happens to some degree in essentially every coffee-processing method.

What changes here is the amount of control and the deliberate manipulation of the fermentation environment.

Yeasts and bacteria consume sugars and generate acids, alcohols, esters and other compounds. Those reactions can influence the aroma, sweetness, acidity and overall sensory experience of the finished coffee.

Some fermentation approaches emphasize clarity.

Some emphasize sweetness.

Some create heavier body.

And processes like this can create huge aromatic fruit expression.

That’s why Tropical Juicebox doesn’t just have a vague sense of “fruitiness.”

Pineapple. Mango. Coconut. Starfruit. Hibiscus.

You don’t need to be a certified coffee taster to find them.

HOW WE ROAST TROPICAL JUICEBOX

Our job at Kings Coast isn’t to manufacture all of those flavors.

Rodrigo and the team at Monteblanco already did the hard part.

Our job is not to screw them up.

We’re taking Tropical Juicebox a little farther than a true light roast, targeting roughly a 408°F drop temperature with a longer Maillard phase to build more sweetness and body.

The goal isn’t to roast the tropical character out of the coffee.

It’s to give all of that pineapple, mango, coconut, starfruit and hibiscus enough structure underneath it that the cup still feels complete.

Push a coffee like this too far and those fermentation-driven aromatics begin disappearing behind heavier roast development.

Go too light and you risk ending up with a cup that is thin, sharp and almost entirely driven by acidity and aromatics.

We want the middle.

Big fruit. Juicy acidity. Developed sweetness. More body. Still completely wild.

That’s why we’re calling this light-medium, not light.

HOW WE’D BREW IT

There isn’t one correct way to brew Tropical Juicebox.

But there are definitely a few ways we’d start.

POUR OVER

If you want to experience everything this coffee can do, this is where we’d begin.

A V60, Kalita, Chemex or similar brewer gives the individual fruit notes room to separate while keeping the cup clean enough to actually identify them.

That slightly tighter 1:15 ratio gives the coffee plenty of intensity and sweetness without turning the cup heavy.

If it tastes too concentrated, move toward 1:16.

If it tastes thin or sharp, don’t immediately start changing everything. Try going slightly finer first and increase extraction.

AEROPRESS

AeroPress brings out a different side of this coffee. More concentrated, more sweetness, still plenty of fruit.

Press slowly and taste before you start chasing a more complicated recipe.

This coffee already has plenty going on.

ESPRESSO

Now we get weird.

Tropical Juicebox can make an absolutely ridiculous modern espresso, but don’t approach it expecting a traditional chocolate-and-caramel shot.

This is going to be intensely aromatic, juicy, sweet and very fruit-forward.

That slightly longer ratio gives the coffee more room to open up and can keep the fruit character from becoming overly dense.

Sharp, sour and thin? Increase extraction.

Dry, hollow or losing the juicy character? Pull it back.

FLASH BREW

This might be one of the most fun ways to drink Tropical Juicebox.

Instead of soaking the coffee cold for hours and potentially muting some of its aromatic character, flash brewing extracts the coffee hot and immediately chills it over ice.

Place the ice in your server and brew the hot portion directly over it.

You get the aromatic extraction of hot coffee with the cold, ridiculously refreshing finish this profile begs for.

Pineapple, mango, starfruit and hibiscus over ice?

Yeah.

Do that.

LET IT COOL

Seriously.

Taste it hot.

Taste it warm.

Then leave a little in the cup and come back to it.

Fruit-forward coffees like this can change dramatically as their temperature drops.

Something that initially registers simply as one giant blast of “tropical” can start separating into much more recognizable individual flavors.

That’s half the fun.

GIVE IT A LITTLE REST, TOO

Fresh coffee doesn’t mean coffee that needs to be brewed five minutes after roasting.

Give Tropical Juicebox a few days to settle.

For filter brewing, we generally like to see whole-bean coffee begin opening up around the three-to-five-day mark.

Espresso usually benefits from more time. Give it at least a solid week, and don’t be surprised if it continues improving deeper into the first couple of weeks.

The important thing is knowing when the coffee was roasted.

That’s why we put the roast date on every bag.

Want the deeper explanation? Read What Does “Fresh Coffee” Actually Mean?

THEN WE MADE THE PACKAGING JUST AS UNHINGED

A coffee called Tropical Juicebox wasn’t going into a quiet beige bag.

For our ninth anniversary, we went straight back to the visual language a lot of us grew up around:

’90s skate graphics. Sticker-bombed decks. Marker drawings. Loud colors. Skate-shop walls. Characters that probably shouldn’t be left unsupervised.

The gold anniversary bag carries a full Tropical Juicebox card clipped to the front, built around J.B., our completely maxed-out juice-box mascot.

And because apparently that wasn’t enough, every bag includes a separate Meet the Crew sticker sheet featuring the characters created specifically for this release.

Meet the Crew

J.B.

Always causing trouble. Fuel level: MAX.

Meet the Crew

SPIKE

Professional beach bum. Beach days: 365.

Meet the Crew

BEANHEADS

Never travels alone. Chaos level: 11/10.

Meet the Crew

BREAKER

Zero personal space. Wipeouts: COUNTLESS.

Meet the Crew

BONES

Still kickflips better than you. Age: TIMELESS.

Yes, we took this too far.

That was sort of the point.

WHY THIS COFFEE FOR NINE YEARS?

Every anniversary release gives us an excuse to do something we wouldn’t normally do.

But nine years feels different.

Kings Coast started in 2017.

Nine years later, we’re still roasting coffee on Long Island, still chasing coffees that make us stop during a cupping and say what the hell is THAT?, and still finding ways to make specialty coffee feel a little less serious without taking the coffee itself any less seriously.

Still finding ways to make specialty coffee feel a little less serious without taking the coffee itself any less seriously.

Tropical Juicebox pretty much sums that up.

Behind the ridiculous juice-box character, stickers and loud graphics is an exceptionally interesting coffee produced by people doing highly technical work at origin.

You can nerd out over fermentation microbiology, Brix, Purple Caturra and controlled processing.

Or you can completely ignore all of that, brew a cup and say:

Holy shit, this tastes like tropical fruit.

Both are acceptable.

For the bigger nine-year story, read Built on Honor: Nine Years of Kings Coast Coffee