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 this micro-lot, coffee cherries were harvested within the 28th to 30th week of maturation. At this point, the cherries contained a large amount of sugars and their mucilage had formed, while the pulp still possessed a substantial amount of tannins and polyphenols responsible for aroma and flavor precursors that make way for the perception of yellow fruits.
The standard pre-cleaning step was then conducted at the processing plant by removing leaves, branches, and other impurities, followed by flotation to facilitate the selection of the most optimal cherries that would proceed to the following phases of post-harvest processing. Before entering the fermentation phase, the cherries were first disinfected with ozone ridding them of extraneous microbiological load, which would likely misdirect the fermentation phase.
Once disinfected, the cherries were placed in 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 prematurely.
The first stage of the double fermentation of this lot involved the generation of gases, such as CO2, in the cherry, which 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 72 hours – and after which it was pulped.
The second stage of the double fermentation involved adding the Yellow Fruits Yeast culture (from El Paraiso’s extensive library) in proportions of 250 mL of culture medium per kilogram of coffee in mucilage and an aerobic phase recirculating the fermentation fluids for 120 hours, with gradual increases in pressure up to 20 psi and temperature at 18°C.
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.
