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 honey process microlot was made possible using two careful and distinct full cherry fermentations, the second of which was heavily fortified and infused. The result is an effusive cup with jasmine florals and flavors of fruit gummies, watermelon jelly, maple syrup, and pink lemonade. It’s fun, sophisticated, totally delicious, and not at all as cartoonish as it may sound.
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 pairing very specific cultivars 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 genetics, 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 on an annual basis).
Processing, particularly the fermentation step, always interested Edwin 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 the fruit fermentation (known as the must in winemaking) 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, brewers hops, and, in this case dehydrated fruit, to develop unique flavors in his microlots.
Peach Mossto Co-Fermented Process
You know you’re writing about a complicated process when you need to start with an abstract. Here goes. Edwin’s processing for this particular lot involved two distinct whole cherry fermentations: one of fresh picked cherry on its own; and a second one in which the cherry was accompanied by a carefully formulated solution of coffee cherry must (a biproduct of the first fermentation) and dried fruit. Finally, the twice-fermented cherry is depulped and moved immediately to raised screen beds to dry, just like a traditional honey would be. Each stage adds a particular bit of uniqueness to the final coffee, so that by the end the coffee is truly one of a kind in the world.
The first fermentation was with fresh coffee cherry only, carefully hand-sorted for ripeness and consistency, washed clean, and immediately moved into 2,000kg tanks to ferment for 24 hours with limited oxygen. During a fermentation like this (which we would consider an “anaerobic maceration” of the cherry) the fruit becomes dramatically softer, sweeter, and more acetic, while also leaching out a concentrated sticky, sugary runoff, the mossto or “must”, not unlike the must from freshly smashed grapes and skins in winemaking.
After this first fermentation was complete, the fermented cherry was separated from its must and moved into much smaller tanks, of 200kg capacity each. The must was then fermented on its own, along with brewer’s yeast to inoculate the process and ample quantities of dried fruit for flavoring. The fermented and flavored must was then mixed into the coffee cherry, at a ratio of 10mL per kilogram. The cherry and must were sealed into the smaller tanks to ferment again for 72 more hours.
In the final step the fermented cherry was lightly depulped leaving most of the mucilage intact (similar to what a “black” honey would be in Costa Rica), and moved directly to Edwin’s greenhouse to dry on raised screen beds, where it dried for 10 days.
The fully dried coffee is then 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.
Edwin used a high quality cultivar here but still a very common one: caturra is considered a “classic” Colombia genetic, having dominated much of the landscape prior to the coffee rust outbreaks of the 2010s. In other words, the arabica genetics themselves are not exotic to Colombia. Rather, the achievement is in the husbandry of the trees, the harvesting, precise blend of the different cherries, and of course the very exacting processing approach created entirely by Edwin. Some “experimental” coffees scream their processes crudely in the cup; the best ones are so symphonic as to seem effortless, the way a well-made bonsai tree can be both a specimen of nature and a monument to an extraordinary amount of work, study, and concentration.
