Colombia - Villa Rosita Red, 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.

Castillo and F6 are cultivars introduced by Colombia’s national coffee research institute, Cenicafe, to mitigate the risk of debilitating productivity declines in the event of a coffee disease epidemic.

F6, also known as Colombia, comes from generations of mixing Catimors. It was released in the early 1980s and has been more known for its resistance to leaf rust than its cup quality. Castillo, meanwhile, was developed as an improvement from F6 and another cultivar, 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 hybrids’ 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 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 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 Villa Rosita Red, overripe coffee cherries were deliberately collected due to the longer contact time between their pulp and coffee seeds, which would impart more fruit flavors to the coffee beans. The coffee cherries were then disinfected with ozone to remove extraneous microbiological load likely to misdirect the fermentation phase.

Once cleaned, the cherries were transferred to stainless steel fermentation tanks for an initial inertization step where CO2 was injected, precluding oxygen and preventing the compounds in the coffee pulp from oxidizing. The generation of gases such as CO2 in the cherry marked the start of the anaerobic fermentation phase, as pressure gradually increased within the tanks and prompted the active transfer of fluids from the pulp to the seeds, while temperature was maintained at 18°C and pressure at 20 psi, for a period of 96 hours.

To intensify the desired fruity attributes, the “Red Fruits Yeast” culture (from El Paraiso’s extensive library) was added to the cherries and pressure was increased to 30 psi to encourage greater adhesion of the aroma and flavor precursors created during fermentation to the coffee beans.

Thermal Shock was applied by quickly turning up the temperature of the fermentation fluids, 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 subjecting the cherries to a drastic drop in temperature, sealing the coffee beans’ pores, locking the aroma and flavor precursors in.

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, 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.