Source Analysis by Chris Kornman & Charlie Habegger
Pedro Nel Salazar is a second-generation coffee farmer, with 200 hectares under his management across two family farms, Sicilia and Cerdeña, which are both located in Quimbaya, a municipality in western Quindío department. 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.
Largely focused on productive verities like Caturra and Castillo, the Salazar’s farms have been in the habit of producing classic central Colombian coffees for many years. This coffee, a mango and coconut co-ferment, is a massive break from that tradition.
Salazar also happens to be the manager of Colombia’s Parque Nacional del Cafe, the National Coffee theme park, complete with the country’s longest roller coaster, bumper cars, and of course coffee cuppings.
Quimbaya is a short drive from Circasia, where Edwin Noreña’s Finca Campo Hermoso is located, a 15-hectare farm, only a few kilometers north of Quindío’s capital city Armenia. 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. 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 used chilis, ginger, various fruits, and, in this case, brewers hops to develop unique flavors in his microlots.
To process the coffee from Finca Sicilia, initial storage and “pre-fermentation” were undertaken by Pedro Nel Salazar, measuring the precise Brix (18°) of the cherries and then soaking them for 2 hours, followed by a 12-hour low-oxygen fermentation. Then, at Campo Hermoso, Edwin Noreña brought the co-fermentation to completion, first undergoing a carbonic maceration for 48 hours. The resulting must (aka mossto or backslop) was inoculated with lactic acid bacteria, and mixed with dehydrated coconut, fresh mango, and allulose sugar. Separately, the coffee cherries were ligthly depulped to a dark honey level, and then macerated with the coconut-mango lactic must solution for another 72 hours. Finally, the finished coffee was pulled from the fermentation tanks, drained but not washed, and dried in a greenhouse with dehydrated pulp for another 10 days.
