Colombia - Letty, 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.

Geisha is the storied variety acclaimed for its delicate complexity and clarity of fruit and floral flavors. For this reason, it is frequently showcased by coffee champions in their competition routines. Acclimatized to the Cauca region, the Geisha has been perceived to be delicately citric, aromatic, fruity, and winey when fermented in cherry.

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 Letty Geisha, coffee cherries were collected at the optimum ripeness level, when they are observed to have more sugars concentrated in the mucilage. The coffee cherries were then depulped and fermented for 48 hours with ‘tropical yeast’ aimed at increasing fruity flavors.

The coffee was then washed with thermal shock to capture as much aromatic precursors into the coffee seed. 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. By removing moisture by mass transfer, the drying phase is accomplished without high temperatures, thereby making way for a less abrupt transition to seed dormancy and in effect allowing preservation of the subtlest nuances of the coffee throughout drying.

The use of the dehumidifier also prevents excessively oxidizing the coffee seeds and effectively arrests unnecessary metabolic processes that may otherwise result in overfermentation and undesirable sensory attributes in the cup. This also contributes to the coffee allowing for storage throughout extended periods without the risk of presenting quality defects, guaranteeing the highest possible quality of the final green coffee.