Fruit, florals, even spice; honey & everything nice 🇨🇴
Taste a dream of paradise with eight ambrosial flavor profiles in your cup
What vision have you been cultivating, and how have you been tending to your dreams? Fuel them with idyllic cups of our new Finca El Paraiso coffees, processed with purpose and precision by award-winning producer and our good friend, Diego Samuel Bermudez.
Finca El Paraiso is the fruition of their family’s dream of a coffee farm as a kind of paradise, where they cultivate an assortment of traditional, novel hybrid, and exotic coffee varieties, and process them with heightened purpose and precision.
Their aim is to continuously create a cornucopia of peerless cup profiles that specialty coffee lovers can inexhaustibly explore and enjoy, as they raise the value of Cauca-grown coffees and elevate the position of Colombia as a pre-eminent origin of higher-end specialty coffees.
Featuring different varieties — Castillo, F6, Caturra Chiroso, and Geisha — in lots that were each processed following individually unique protocols defined, implemented, and documented at such a high level of granularity we previously could just dream about, these coffees allow us to acquaint more of our friends, from different walks of life, with that legendary Finca El Paraiso ingenuity that we love to taste in our cups and eagerly learn about.
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The Purpose of Precise Processing
For a time, there was a popular, unfavorable sentiment around the potential of hybrids like F6 and Castillo to cup well in comparison to older varieties like Caturra. It was in that context socially conscious and innovative producers like Diego Samuel Bermudez pursued post-harvest processing experiments intending to illustrate that the resilience and productivity of hybrid varieties like F6 and Castillo can go hand-in-hand with good, even exceptional, cup quality.
This served to increase awareness among Colombian coffee farmers that they can reduce their risk of loss by planting disease-resistant varieties while remaining confident that their coffees can cup competitively and thus be valued at a premium. On top of that, their successful experiments would open up numerous trajectories for creating a diversity of unique flavor profiles, augmenting opportunities for the farmers to be better rewarded for their hard work.
Finca El Paraiso's ingenuity lies in having thoroughly studied, implemented, and documented their simultaneously structured and creative processing methods and techniques, enabling the consistent repeatability of their approaches and effectively unconstraining their potential to increase the diversity of probable flavor profiles, depending on the customers' preferences, varieties on hand, and the prevailing terroir conditions at the time of processing.
Finca El Paraiso is the realization of one family’s dream of a coffee farm as a kind of paradise. It started to materialize in 2008 when Diego Samuel Bermudez and his family began to cultivate an assortment of traditional, novel, and exotic coffee varieties across the well-endowed and sky-reaching terrains of Vereda Los Arados, Tunía in the Piendamó municipality of the Cauca department in Colombia.
It is their family’s flagship farm, spanning 49 hectares, and the headquarters of their trailblazing post-harvest processing company, INDESTEC S.A.S, shorthand for “Innovation and Technological Development for Agriculture.” This is their platform for ongoing research into and the promotion of precise and purposeful experimental methods and techniques, like the stirringly named “Thermal Shock,” intended to create a cornucopia of peerless cup profiles.
Their aim — to distinguish Finca El Paraiso among the department and the nation’s accomplished and prolific producers, generate greater interest across global specialty coffee lovers, elevate the value of Cauca-grown coffees, and on the whole, contribute to continuously raising the profile and position of Colombia as an innovative and pre-eminent origin of higher-end specialty coffees.
Finca El Paraiso’s location on the Pan-American route between Popayán, Cauca’s capital, and Cali, a municipality in the neighboring department Valle del Cauca, with a prevailing climate described as temperate-humid and the frequent incidence of winds from the Pacific, has been attributed for the tropical notes frequently perceived in their coffees.
Meanwhile, Cauca is one of the 21 officially designated coffee-growing departments of Colombia, which was granted its “Denomination of Origin” in 2011 as a testament to the remarkable quality and distinct flavor identity of its coffees. Due to Colombia’s immense heterogeneity of microclimates, terroirs, varieties, and their resultant flavor characters, Colombia is regarded in the world of coffee as a “Land of Diversity.” When traditionally washed, Cauca coffees are generally characterized as clean, soft, and fragrant, with pronounced caramelized aromas and carrying flavors tending toward high acidity with discernible sweet and floral notes, a medium body, and a balanced overall impression.
Amid this backdrop, Finca El Paraiso truly caught the specialty coffee world’s attention when Diego Samuel made it to the Top 10 of the 2018 Cup of Excellence with a double anaerobic Bourbon, and again counted among the 2019 winners with a washed anaerobic Castillo.
Five years on from their first COE accolade and 15 years after Finca El Paraiso’s founding, the family emblem Finca Paraiso has come to encompass six more farms — Villa Rosita, Villa Alejandro, Villa Esperanza, Sur, El Rubi, and El Manizales — and their family’s dream continues to prosper while empowering the communities they work with to succeed. They do this through INDESTEC’s six action pillars — Technology, Knowledge Management, Collaboration, Sustainable Marketing, Resource Management, and Rural Alliances.