Edwin Noreño is one of Colombia’s true processing obsessives. Known among friends as “El Alquimista” (the alchemist), Edwin has dialed in a wide repertoire of fermentation profiles, often using multiple fermentations in sequence to achieve a desired expression. This gesha microlot was processed using two distinct fermentations and the addition of both yeast and galaxy hops, which give the final coffee a gingery sparkle along with flavors of jasmine, lime zest, and fruit taffy.
Quindío Department and Finca Campo Hermoso
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. Its 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 is a third-generation coffee grower and agricultural engineer. Processing, particularly the fermentation step, always interested him because of its potential to transform raw coffee seeds into a remarkably unique sensory experience for coffee drinkers. A breakthrough moment for him was realizing that the sugary, residual liquid produced during whole cherry fermentation could be used again in subsequent fermentations to add natural sugars, and also serve as a solvent for flavoring agents. Over the years Edwin has co-fermented with chilis, ginger, various fruits, and, in this case, brewers hops to develop unique flavors in his microlots.
Galaxy Hop Honey Process
Edwin’s processing for this particular lot involves two very different fermentations: one of purely fresh whole coffee cherries and another with the depulped parchment coffee combined with a custom-made coffee cherry must. Gesha being a famously floral and delicate cultivar, the idea was to fully express the coffee’s natural sweetness and aromatics, while also adding complimentary flavor components for intensity and complexity.
For this lot, gesha cherry at Campo Hermoso was first picked and carefully hand-sorted for ripeness and consistency, washed clean, and immediately moved into sealed tanks to ferment for 72 hours. During this first fermentation the fruit becomes dramatically softer and sweeter, while also leaching out a concentrated sticky, sugary runoff, or “must”, not unlike the must from freshly smashed grapes and skins in winemaking.
After the 72 hours was complete, the fermented cherry was depulped and moved back into the tanks, along with a carefully customized solution containing the cherry must, brewer’s yeast, and a liquified galaxy hops. This solution was combined at a 1/10 ratio to parchment coffee, and the entire mixture was allowed to ferment another 72 hours.
Once the parchment was co-fermented with the must solution, it was moved directly to Edwin’s solar drier without rinsing or cleaning, and dried inside on raised beds for 10 days. 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.
