Colombia Quindio Chili Bourbon Aji

For such a naturally gifted department as Quindío, it tends to receive less recognition than others for its coffee. Quindío is Colombia’s second-smallest department by size, making up only about 0.2% of the national territory. It’s location, however, right on the central cordillera of Colombia’s vast Andes divide, and centrally between the country’s largest and most influential cities (Bogotá, Medellín, and Cali), give it a high volume of tourist traffic, coffee industry, airline commuters, and idyllic getaways in the form of brightly painted mountain towns, natural reserves, and high elevation tropical landscapes throughout. Almost the entire department is mountainous, its lowest elevations still over 1000 meters, and many parts are dense with coffee plantations, from the small to the large and ambitious. 

Finca Campo Hermoso is a 15-hectare farm outside of Circasia, only a few kilometers north of Quindío’s capital city Armenia. It’s owner, Edwin Noreña, is an agroindustrial engineer by trade with graduate-level studies in biotechnology. Edwin is a well-connected and highly aspirational coffee producer who focuses on cultivating very specific varieties paired with very specific processing methods designed to express the most surprising, memorable, and delicious coffees possible within his resources. Finca Campo Hermoso concentrates on growing a wide variety of coffee cultivars, including pink bourbon, yellow bourbon, yellow caturra, bourbon sidra, gesha, and Cenicafé 1, a resistant hybrid developed by Cenicafé, Colombia’s national coffee research institute. The resulting coffees are often marketed under “El Alquimista”, Edwin’s personal brand for his microlots, which have featured in barista competitions and choosy roasters around the world (and Royal Coffee’s own inventory from time to time). 

Edwin’s processing for this particular lot involves a two-step fermentation, followed by raised bed drying. Fresh cherry is first soaked in water for 1 hour, and then fermented in the style of carbonic maceration, in which the fruit is sealed in a chamber with a one-way valve for oxygen to escape but not enter, creating an increasingly CO2-rich environment as the cherry ferments. After 96 hours in the sealed chamber, the cherry is removed and fermented a second time in a loosely covered tank for 48 hours. Once the second fermentation is complete, the finished cherry is taken directly to raised beds to dry in the sun. Drying takes about 3 weeks for this process and continues until the dried cherry is measuring between 10.5-11.0% moisture. The fully dried coffee is conditioned for 8 days in a warehouse, allowing for humidity to stabilize inside the seeds, and then moved into GrainPro bags for long-term storage, where it is cupped numerous times over the next few weeks for quality analysis. 

The big twist to the processing, however, is not only the numerous fermentation styles. At the start of each cherry fermentation, Edwin mixes in a what he calls a “chili must”, a homemade concentrated extract of chili peppers, in order to manipulate the fermentation and infuse the coffee with an additional kick of flavor. While infused fermentations like this rarely bring forth a direct result, we must admit, the balance to the final cup is admittedly sweet-spicy in an incredibly seductive way. The processing steps produce a viscous and refined tactile with out-of-this-world flavors of Aleppo-style pepper, candied ginger, spiced drinking chocolate, cranberry, and mulled wine.  

The decision to use chilis here relates to the cultivar itself: ají is a south American word for chili peppers generically and was given to this particular strain of arabica by a Colombia Cup of Excellence farmer from Huila, José Salazar, who, during harvest, perceived a spicy pepper-like fragrance coming from the coffee fruit as it was broken off its branches. After earning 6th place in the Cup of Excellence in 2021, an investigation was launched into the genetic origins of the winning plants; it was discovered that they were in fact of an unknown lineage to Colombia; however, they could be genetically linked to certain rare landrace varieties in Ethiopia. It wasn’t, in fact, even a bourbon as far as researchers could tell. So the name stuck and seeds, as it happens, were sought from other growers like Edwin. 

Oxygen-deprived, or “anaerobic” fermentation environments like the above have gained traction among processing wonks in coffee for the unique flavors and tanginess they can add, as well as creating exaggerated lactic- or phosphoric-like characteristics in the cup compared to what we’re used to. Edwin, by investing in his processing knowhow, and in this case, a drive for flavor enhancement, is able to produce a wide variety of cup profiles from a small parcel of land, further expanding cuppers’ expectations of Quindío coffees and evolving the standards of his peers, not to mention boosting the notoriety of Campo Hermoso and the 30 families that contribute work to the farm.