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 pink bourbon microlot was processed using three distinct fermentations and the addition of galaxy hops, which give the final coffee a candy-like structure and flavors of lychee, rose, pear, and anise. 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. 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 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 used chilis, ginger, various fruits, and, in this case, brewers hops to develop unique flavors in his microlots. Washed Carbonic Maceration Bourbon Sidra Edwin’s processing for this particular Bourbon Sidra lot involved two distinct whole cherry fermentations before the coffee cherries were depulped and placed to dry on raised screen beds. The first fermentation was with fresh coffee cherry only, carefully hand-sorted for ripeness and consistency, washed clean, and immediately moved into covered tanks to ferment for 48 hours with limited oxygen. Some consider this kind of step to be a “pre-fermentation" because the coffee is not fully fermented; rather, the coffee fruit becomes dramatically softer, sweeter, and more acetic as the flesh begins to overripen and break down. Once the first, fermentation was complete, the cherries were moved into 2000kg tanks for a second, fully oxygen deprived, (anaerobic) fermentation for a total of 72 hours. This type of treatment is known as “carbonic maceration”, since the oxygen is pushed out a one-way valve leaving the cherry to sit surrounded by its own carbon dioxide instead. During this phase the cherry leaches out a concentrated sticky, sugary runoff, called the mossto or “must”, not unlike the must from freshly smashed grapes and skins in winemaking. In the final step the fermented cherry was depulped and washed. Washed parchment is then moved directly to Edwin’s greenhouse to dry on raised screen beds, where it dried for 8 to 10 days. Like all microlots at Campo Hermoso, the final fully dried coffee was 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 was cupped numerous times over the next few weeks for quality analysis. 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 lactic- or phosphoric-like characteristics in the cup compared to what we’re used to. Edwin, by investing in his processing knowhow, and in this case, a drive for flavor enhancement, 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.
