This is a smooth and decadent natural with hefty date and chocolate sweetness, soft juicy acids, and delicate rose-like aromatics. Cherry for this microlot came from 4 small producers in Cauca’s Sotará region, which was then blended and dried together in an innovative solar drier in Popayán.
Central Cauca
The highlands around the large city of Popayán, the capital of Colombia's Cauca department, are seemingly endless. This part of Colombia's central Andes is on the whole less dramatically steep than southern Huila or Nariño, and more a series of broad mesas with long vistas and rolling hills. The landscape tends to be dotted with pines and cacti along with the tropical fauna and grass typical of this elevation. The fact that most of the department is harvesting coffee almost every month of the year means that fresh coffee is always available.
Along the eastern Cauca border with Huila elevations rise sharply, culminating in the Puracé National Park, a dramatic highland territory spanning both deparments with consistent frosts, tundra-like ground cover, and volcanic peaks that surpass 4,000 meters above sea level. As one might imagine, the lower elevations on either side of the park can be magnificent for coffee quality.
The 4 farmers that comprise this microlot, José Benito Garzón Carvajal, Omar Henry Cuaji Guevara, Evelio Gómez Vidal, and Leonel Macías Zúñiga, all operate here between about 1800-1900 meters, extremely high, cold and wet for Colombia coffee as a whole, with relative humidity reaching 80% at times. As a result, their local climate is not conducive to drying naturals in the open air. However, Banexport, the exporter who represents them, found a way around this.
Anaerobic Fermentation and Solar Drying
Between harvest and the drying stage, cherry from these 4 producers was fermented for 7 entire days in a bioreactor, a kind of thermally insulated tank that includes aeration and agitation control, as well as sensors for temperature and oxygen levels to monitor biological reactions of various sorts. These devices have many uses, but in coffee can offer a highly controllable fermentation environment. In this case the bioreactor was used to prolong an anaerobic fermentation of the whole cherry, slowly encouraging the sugars to peak, the fruit to soften, and additional volatile compounds to develop that the finished coffee would express in the cup.
Banexport operates a large 2-part solar dryer at their processing facility in nearby Popayán, where the fermented cherry for this microlot was taken to dry. The large tower generates hot, low-humidity air through radiant sun exposure in its upper part, and then circulates the air through insulated lower chambers where the coffee rests on suspended screen beds. The entire process is designed to mimic the wam, dry conditions in much of East Africa during their harvest months, and typically takes 19-24 days to complete for naturals like these.
Once the coffee reaches the target 10.5% moisture it leaves the solar dryer and is stored in GrainPro bags for 2 weeks, a resting period that allows the moisture to equilibrate across the coffee bean and water activity to reduce, both of which help to maintain the coffee’s flavors over time.
