Colombia El Alquimista Purple Honey Sidra Bourbon 35kg GrainPro

Coffee Background

For such a naturally gifted department as Quindío, precious few coffees seem to make it out into the world. 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 cordilla 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 is 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 coincentrates on growing cultivars far apart from the nationally-distributed hybrids, or traditional Caturra: the farm has in production pink bourbon, yellow bourbon, bourbon sidra, gesha, and Cenicafe 1, a resistant hybrid developed by Cenicafé, Colombia’s national coffee research institute. The resulting coffees are marketed under “El Alquimista”, Edwin’s personal brand for his microlots, which have featured in barista competitions and choosy roasters around the world.

Bourbon sidra is a kind of dream cultivar, originally created by Nestlé on their research farm in Ecuador by manually crossing red bourbon and typica varieties with the goal of creating a purely high-quality cultivar with the best characteristics of each progenitor. The result was shared for free among regional farmers in exchange for their feedback. While bourbon sidra, often simply called “sidra”, is common and well-known in Ecuador, in Colombia it is scarce, save for a few farmers, most of whom have traveled to Ecuador expressly to source it.
Edwin’s “purple honey” process uses a combination of anaerobic cherry fermentation, mucilage fermentation, and a traditional honey process to achieve the final profile. Once picked, sidra cherries are fermented anaerobically for 56 hours prior to depulping. Once stripped of the surrounding cherry, the sticky parchment is then fermented dry (without the addition of water) for 48 hours, and then immediately moved to a combination of patio and raised screen beds to dry in the sun.
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 characteristics in the cup compared to what we’re used to. Edwin, by investing in his processing knowhow, 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.