Colombia - P02 Red Plum, Finca El Paraiso

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.

The Castillo variety is a hybrid introduced by Colombia’s national coffee research institute, Cenicafe, in 2005 to mitigate the risk of debilitating productivity declines in the event of a coffee disease epidemic. It was developed as an improvement from the earlier released cultivars Colombia/F6 (circa 1982) and Tabi (Circa 2002) in terms of resilience, productivity, and cup quality. Generally, Castillo had been observed to cup as dominantly chocolatey and cherry-like with touches of citrus.

For a time, there was a popular, unfavorable sentiment around Castillo's potential 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 a hybrid variety like 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 and INDESTEC's ingenuity lies in having thoroughly studied, implemented, and documented their simultaneously structured and creative processing methods and techniques at such a high level of granularity that allows for consistent repeatability of their approaches and effectively unconstrains 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.

To consistently achieve the desired cup profiles, precision in configuring the different processing parameters at every significant phase is a hallmark of harvesting, sorting, fermentation, and drying at Finca El Paraiso.

For our P-02 Red Plum, overripe coffee cherries were deliberately collected due to the longer contact time between their pulp and coffee seeds, allowing more of the concentration of tannins, polyphenols, esters, and other compounds in the pulp to be transmitted into the seeds, imparting red fruit attributes to the beans.

The cherries were then pre-cleaned and sorted by removing leaves, branches, and other impurities, followed by flotation to facilitate the selection of the most optimal cherries, and disinfection with ozone to remove extraneous microbiological load before proceeding to the 36-hour anaerobic fermentation phase, submerged in water.

After fermentation, coffee was pulped and demucilaginated. The pulp and mucilage were taken to the main processing plant and used to produce specific microorganisms that would constitute the culture medium called “Yeast Red Fruits” containing the precursors of the desired aromas and flavors. The resultant culture medium was then added to the coffee for another 12 hours of fermentation, allowing the precursors to adhere to the coffee beans through pressure. To reinforce the adhesion of the aroma and flavor precursors to the beans, a Thermal Shock Washed technique was applied.

Thermal Shock Washing was done by quickly turning up the temperature of the fermentation fluids to 40°C, rapidly opening up the membranes and pores of the coffee beans and facilitating the attachment of the abundant aroma and flavor precursors in the fermentation medium to them, and immediately following it with a wash using 12°C cold water to seal the coffee beans’ pores, locking the aroma and flavor precursors in.

Otherwise, these precursors, such as the esters, aldehydes, organic acids, and alcohols produced by the metabolism of the earlier mentioned microorganisms as they consumed the coffee mucilage, would have remained in the leachate (i.e., not absorbed into the coffee bean), because the parchment and silver film covering the coffee beans are difficult to penetrate before Thermal Shock, and would then have wastefully just been washed off.

As for the crucial drying phase, Finca El Paraiso’s custom drying and dehumidifying technology was used. It was designed with consideration to the usually highly volatile and thermolabile compounds generated during fermentation and genetically inherent in the coffees. As such, it removes moisture by mass transfer, allowing the drying phase to be accomplished without high temperatures, and thereby making way for a less abrupt transition to seed dormancy. This, in effect, permits the coffee to be stored for extended periods without the risk of presenting quality defects and guarantees the highest possible quality of the final green coffee.