Into the co-ferment kingdom: a trip to Finca Monteblanco

Specialty coffee has a schism - those who find fun with synthetic, funky flavors in coffee and those who demonize it. Even for those against it, whether it be disagreeing with the heart or with the tongue, there’s no ignoring or denying its intensity and novelty. I’m a funk enjoyer - my gateway into specialty coffee was from the wacky world of IPA beers thanks to living in San Diego in my 20’s; I embrace those overtly potent flavor punches.

I am not a coffee professional, but I am the sample roaster behind-the-scenes at Hydrangea. As it started in 2023, it was the wild west of reaching out to any and everyone we wanted to source from; it was an excuse to get the beans we wanted. As Hydrangea has bloomed into a real business, it behooves us to consolidate smarter sourcing with closer partnerships. This doesn’t imply selling out or reducing quality - quite the opposite. We’re more confident in our identity, better at finding the coffee we want to offer, and operate more efficiently with a collaborative set of partners to keep up those fun, weekly coffee launches.

A goal of this trip was to strengthen our relationship with a producer partner. There’s only so much trust you can build with someone through WhatsApp exchanges. To get our feet on the ground and take in the epistemic experiences of what a producer represents, Ally (importer) and Clearpath (exporter) coordinated a 4 day trip for us to Pitalito to visit Rodrigo Sanchez and Elkin Guzman.

To be explicit, this was not a standard coffee tour. We would be granted significant access to the facilities and escorted through multiple farms. Towards the end, we would cup coffees across the portfolio for evaluation. It is not easy, cheap, or quick for a importer/exporter to coordinate this type of engagement, or for a farmer to leave the fields; hence a minimum purchasing commitment was made prior.

My personal goal was to demystify the world of funky coffees colloquially deemed “illegal” due to various competition policies. There remains plenty of hesitation in specialty coffee communities to accept these coffees. Fingers are pointed at the overarching perception that mysterious, secretive, and shady practices means that we can’t trust them. It’s critiqued as lipstick on a pig, that it’s a technique used to cover up bad farming techniques. And then there’s the flavor thing. Labeled as cheap tricks, fakery, deception; the material that goes in isn’t necessarily the flavor that comes out. But from the purist’s priorities of appreciating terroir, farming practices, and allowing the flavor of the bean to speak for itself, the additive processing crosses the line for many in terms of being “authentic” flavors.

Day 1

Traveling to Bogota is the same as being to any other major airport - luxury brand stalls strewn through unique-but-consistent glass architecture. But that globally consistent experience quickly shunk upon learning that a total of two carriers service a single daily flight each to Pitalito, Huila. The other flight was delayed indefinitely due to the bewilderingly common, end-of-month fuel supply shortage. Between climbing the staircase onto the propeller plane and touching down an hour later, the scale of Colombia’s coffee enterprise snapped into focus. Of the twenty-some folks on the flight, it became clear from the passive murmurs and small talk that a sizeable fraction were there as coffee professionals. Among the waiting line of departing passengers who would be occupying our seats on their way back to Bogota, I could see as many folks in their coffee-branded gear, clearly returning from their own coffee excursions.

Sipping a couple beers in the Pitalito airport bar/restaurant/gift shop with my new friend, Sam LaRobardiere of Theory Coffee, we awaited the uncertain fuel status of the other flight carrying the rest of the team. A fellow named Miguel representing Clearpath had been instructed to find someone matching our vague descriptions, and stumbling through the language barrier and logistic uncertainty, we were off to one of the farms. On the way, we pulled over on the side of the street and a suave, well-dressed man hopped out of the rain into the truck next to me. Agronomist and coffee producer Fabian Murcia, despite not speaking any English, proceeded to whip out his phone and run me through the soil composition report he’d just put together for his new, 150 hectare, 2150MASL, gesha-only farm: Las Guineas. That’s one heck of a greeting.

We arrived an hour later up the hilly hills of Finca El Mirador, pulling up to an active fire pit. Elkin Guzman and his wife, Diana, handed us a plate of barbecue as we took shelter from the worsening rain. The uncertainty of where we were, or when and if the rest of the team would ever arrive was quickly forgotten as the sight of coffee gear meant we could keep ourselves busy.

I was impressed by the gazebo setup - a Rocket Apartamento, 1Zpresso grinders, Brewista kettles, and a recently roasted sample of Elkin’s washed “Spring” process catiope. Water mineralization and particle size distribution be damned, those were some good brews.

The jet fuel was eventually found, and the rest of the team made it not too long after. Elkin and Rodrigo said a few opening words to formally kick off the on-site and expressed their eagerness to build relationships and de-stigmatize the air of mystery around their coffees. If the sights and smells I experienced through the trip were faked, that in itself would be more amazing.

Finally, some coffee talk. Across the Clearpath portfolio, they handle the following varietals:

And work with the following processes:

Refer to Chris’s glossary for further info on what some of these entail. Noticeably absent is using thermalshock as a step, which Elkin pointed out that they have the facilities to perform and had tried in the past, but had on pause at the time at Mirador.

In a processing lab, Elkin described their philosophy to rationalize their techniques. For example, fermentation taken too far, you get cheesiness. I was reminded of our own struggles as home coffee brewers, where we use different tools and adjust within our experiential frameworks, and the science is hopefully logically sound and remains consistent for us to make useful decisions next time. But undoubtedly, things are happening, as we stuck our hands inside fermentation tanks to feel the temperature differences. Some months back, Brian and I stuck our hands to feel the heat in an oxidation process, but here, the tank filled with salt was quite chilly towards the center.

As a coffee enthusiast, it can be hard to visualize how a farm… works. Pickers harvest cherry in the fields, then what? Some farms lay them out on African beds, some places dry the cherry through indirect sun exposure on building rooftops. These aren’t buildings in the traditional sense, they are production lines built for effective workflows of moving coffee along its various stages.

El Mirador has capacity to process 60,000kg of cherry at once, with 800kg per fermentation tank. Seemingly a big number, but in truth, I don’t have context if that is particularly high compared to other mega-farms, let alone in specialty. We observed UV and ozone sterilizers used to minimize contamination from fermentation between batches. Machines are cool, but more memorable was the reality that fruit flies are everywhere, small wonder with the entire facility engulfed in the aroma of simmering fruit juice.

As daylight faded, we rushed over to see the drying room, an entire building of African beds laid out like military barrack bunk beds with a controlled flow of air. I was brought back to the trip to Finca Soledad and the concentrated aroma of drying cherries. Forget weird fermentation - the intensity of aroma comes only from coffee handled well up until this point, and you can feel how proud they are to show off this part of the process. No coferments or funny business was happening here, and with this standard drying process, judgments could be made about their processing skills. They were particularly excited to tell us about the iterations that led to using blue plastic roofing, which reduced ambient heat vs. other colors they’d tried. The plastic flex would concave and convex throughout the heat cycle of the day, allowing the room to “breathe”. Like at Finca Soledad, the unique sweetness in the humid air is consistent and recognizable as a quality that makes its way through the roast and into the final cup; it’s a sensation worth visiting a farm for alone.

Day 2

The next morning we drove into the valleys to see the farms. Way before this trip, I’d browsed sites like Ally’s to get a glimpse of the farms with interesting processes; I’d finally stepped into to that scenery. First stop, Las Veraneras (1600-1700MASL), where they separate their various geshas cultivars - the original type grown from the beginning of the farm, the geshas they’d selected for later on, and geshas planted from seeds brought in from Panama.

The view is a postcard - a stunning reminder of how much of a coffee powerhouse not only Colombia overall is, but in particular the Huila region. The entire landscape is terraformed to maximize production efficiency, and everything in sight is coffee. As a suburban creature, it’s hard to wrap my head around this sort of scale.

I’d consider myself a recreational outdoor enthusiast and a fairly experienced hiker. That confidence evaporated when seeing the inclines that are standard for coffee cherry picking here. What I’d consider dangerous or fatal dropoffs were terrains that the experienced pickers appeared unbothered by as they moved up and down terrifyingly swiftly.

Rodrigo had a surprise - we were standing in a field of Ethiopian landraces that had been acquired through exchanges with other producers. I didn’t expect that and I got my hopes up for a clean, washed offering in the land of funk. I’ve been a fan of unexpected varietals grown in other countries, such as the typically Kenyan SL28 in Costa Rica and batian in Bolivia.

Purple caturra is a cultivar nearly proprietary to Finca Monteblanco (though it’s been seen elsewhere recently, e.g. Yunnan). Well before Finca Monteblanco was established in its current form, Rodrigo’s great-grandfather grew coffee here as part of a larger cooperative. At the time, the standard was commodity (not specialty grade) coffee, and they had no idea what happened once their coffee was sent off on the trucks. In 2012 the region was overwhelmed by La Roya (coffee leaf rust), forcing a evolve-or-die situation, and they took the gamble on specialty coffee, the first time considerations were made for coffee flavor over yield.

An offshoot of the usual caturra, it was selected for its compatibility with the types of experimental processing they were working with as they diversified and transitioned to an emphasis on coffee flavors rather than yield. The reason why you don’t see it too often from other producers is bureaucratic - it cannot be commercially sold and traded to other producers due to not being recognized and certified as a documented varietal by Cenicafe, Colombia’s central coffee research center.

Deeper into the field, we stopped at a certain darker tree which Rodrigo identified as the original purple caturra tree. It’s hard to express how exceptional a claim is being made, that a certain tree is the originator of the lineage of an entire cultivar; imagine seeing the first identified breed of a certain dog or cat in a museum. It still bears fruit, though Rodrigo notes it is not necessarily better than its descendants. Sam from Theory asked what process would would be suggestible for isolating just the harvest from the identified elder trees - Rodrigo confidently went with natural.

I whipped out the bag of Hydrangea coconut lemonade I was planning to gift during lunch, it was too rare an opportunity to miss getting a photo of a coffee with its progenitor.

Where we parked next wasn’t near a field of trees, but a hall of dirt mounds. At the end, we ran into Fabian yet again, I didn’t even realize he’d been moving independently from our caravan; the man has a habit of being popping in and out and being everywhere at once. This was his place, his time to shine. As an agronomist, his specialty is to consider the soil mineralization most conducive to the long-term maintenance of consistent coffee quality. Listening to him speak about soil reminded me of how passionate I get when I try to explain how important water mineral composition is for brewing. But for Fabian, it’s his job to devise solutions at scale across different farms of different soil qualities for the millions of kilos of annualy harvested cherry. The farms can have great output today, but investing into the future is the key to maintaining that success. Terroir is a term that gets shorthanded to “this land naturally has amazing soil for growing coffee/wine”, but this idyllic view overlooks the investment, research, and labor involved to proactively maintain it for the long-term. Check out Lucia’s podcast episodes for more on this.

Nutrients in soil deplete over time, and this effect is exacerbated for any number of top-of-mind reasons like global warming or commercialization. Colombia has multiple annual harvest seasons, meaning carbon and nitrogen cycle components iterate more frequently. By the time it’s identified that soil depletion is the cause for lower quality output, it’s perhaps too late to pivot and even more expensive, time-wise and financially, to reverse the impact, if even possible.

Across the Aromas del Sur farms and friends, biochar is their weapon of choice. Biochar is a carbon-rich soil made from burning organic matter in a low-oxygen environment, not quite a direct substitute for fertilizers. Handling a block of biochar and a chunk of dirt wedged off a nearby cliff face, the biochar was more dense and complex. With microbiological diversity, structure to facilitate tree root structures, and a topsoil layer formed that’s resilient to being washed away, Fabian tells us that processing aside, this R&D investment is why their crop quality will persist for years. That’s where my comprehension of soil chemistry ends, and the soil mineral report PDFs he got so fired up about to me about in Spanish made a bit more sense.

I’m a gifter on these trips and what I brought this time felt particularly relevant. Puchao, Hichew, and various other Japanese gummies closely mimic the synthetic sugar-ey taste in coferment and thermalshock processes, and I wanted to share with them that their coffee flavor profiles coexists in my culture. I came with numerous bags of the coconut lemonade so there’d be enough for the staff to try what we are doing with the fruits of their labor. On origin trips, it’s hard to ignore the fact that we are guests of honor, and it’s critical to keep in mind that this isn’t a vacation. The time the producer and staff could be spending on the coffee itself is diverted to sharing their craft and passion with us, and the goal of this post is to make that effort known. The least we can do is to share with them about what motivates us in coffee.

Finally, we’d made it into the coferment kingdom in Finca La Loma. A striking mural tells us what we need to know about the attitude and philosophy which led to the creation of these wild, modern flavors. We’re nearing the climax. The buildup of walking us through the trees and farming practices is for this next place, where they make their literal special sauce.

Finca La Loma was originally part of a larger cooperative started in 2002 which involved around 550k households throughout the Pitalito municipality. At the time, they sold picked lots, minimally sorted for quality, at fixed prices based on volume output, with no understanding of how it was handled or what prices they fetched downstream; this is still the standard set by commodity coffee. In 2007, Rodrigo’s family went independent from the cooperative and Finca La Loma in its current form was established in 2011. Because they were still sending out coffee without understanding their customer, they were unaware of the reputation it was gathering and that it was fetching higher prices. As the origin story goes, in response to their first order in 2013, Mark from Hub Coffee Roasters wrote a letter to National Federation of Coffee Growers of Colombia (FNC) asking for Rodrigo’s coffees at any price. The connection between producer and customer was made, and the ball was rolling and starting to pick up momentum.

La Loma is another architecture designed for the flow of production. Upstairs, separated lots are shade-dried or in a room of raised African beds. Downstairs, there’s machinery and pits to handle a washed processes, a chemistry lab, and chambers for controlled drying.

When asked about his personal favorite process, Rodrigo notes that he would prefer to do natural process because of shelf life. But Rodrigo is not shy about his stance as a businessman: “I am not making these coffees for my own taste, it’s a response to what the market wants.” He’s well aware of the accusations made towards coffees like his - that there’s fakery, deception, and lies in the product. Or that if the natural qualities of the coffees are being masked up, that the farm must be producing shit quality to resort to such practices. The order of what was presented to us was to indicate to us the effort spent upstream to the cofermentation, and that the unique processing is just one step, a competitive edge of protocols they have invested to iterate and perfect. More on this when we get to the tasting. If we’re getting Truman Show-ed and the whole facility is a fabrication to swindle us… well that would be quite a cost-inefficient and difficult way to try to cover things up. Downstairs into the fruit pits we go.

Rodrigo explains what he often gets asked - why his coferments are designated as a washed process when the flavors clearly don’t reflect the expectations of such a label. Washed literally means that the cherry is depulped from the fruit and the sticky mucilage layer is washed away before fermentation. With their infrastructure and eco-pulper device, it is cheaper, economic on water usage, higher output, and leaves fewer variables for them to factor before their novel experimental stages. Technically washed.

Their numerous blue tanks can fit 200kg of pulped seeds ready for fermentations. With a standard natural process where the mass of entire cherries are being spread on the patios upstairs, they can handle ~140kg at once, which downsizes to around 20kg after weight loss. Washing prior to fermentation yields efficient output for the labor, around 40kg of pulped material downscales to a similar 20kg.

The machines turned on, and we got to do a bit of manual labor - each batch of fruit additive is measured out beforehand for a desired ratio of bean to cofermenting agent. We saw mango, which went to Black&White, watermelon which went to Diverso and Luminous, and sangria, which made its way to Brandywine.

And here’s the moment you’re here for - cofermentation at work.

Rodrigo popped the top on a barrel of cofermening watermelon nectar citrullus and invited us to dip our fingers into the bubbling soup for a lick. If you’ve had a coferment and observed that synthetic candy flavor which tastes nothing like the real fruit, that flavor is in full force here in liquid form.

Pineapples, passionfruit, mango, berries, sugar, yogurt; whatever they have access to within their local markets, they’ve tried. Claudia, producer and Rodrigo’s wife, came up with the idea to do kombucha pineapple. As goofy enthusiasts, we’re quick to chime in with the next unhinged ingredient to coferment with; they’re the professionals at this.

It seems simple - toss fruit into bean tank, make flavor. Of course they know that the fruit that goes in isn’t necessarily the flavor that comes out. If they’ve caught lightning in a bottle, and need to be able to replicate that outcome. Their expertise and skill set is to create protocols for the most effective way to recreate the successes. And to trial those protocols, there’s a test room to prototype fermentations.

In this lab, they identify the ratios and means of fermentation suited to a fermentation trial. For example, pineapples and watermelon may be fine tossed in whole, but strawberries may behave better pureed in liquid form. Citric acid or yeasts may be needed to be introduced inoculate the fermentation. Experimentation isn’t free or cheap, and upscaling small batches to larger production volumes is an engineering discipline on its own; a level of executional rigor is needed to ensure R&D costs don’t bleed the business.

Moving on from coferments, Rodrigo was eager to show us his latest thing - cold room fermentation, which is exactly how it sounds. Pulped cherries are held in GrainPro bags for a certain time in a reduced temperature environment. I’ve roasted a couple cold ferment offerings prior to this trip, and the effect is there - they taste unique and lean towards jammy flavors with extended, sweet linger, but without the signature stench of overfermentation. I couldn’t help but feel the undertone that this was another process they were under scrutiny for as being faked. Cold ferment isn’t unique to this farm, Panama’s got it too. Perhaps the major barrier to execution is the infrastructure to power what is essentially a giant walk-in fridge.

Even after a full day of peeking behind the scenes at the latest coffee processing, we spent the end of the day touching trees. The trees at the edge of La Loma produce laurina, and we ate the fruit off the tree to try to make sense of how cherry flavor of varietals relate to brewed in-cup results.

As the sun set, our caravan drove down the mountain and the reality of traveling in the countryside set in - a closure on the only road meant we were stuck. Street vendors and peddlers mysteriously came out of the woodwork to capitalize on the situation. Off to the side of the road, we made the most of it and danced and partied as the last of daylight faded into night. I don’t know for how many hours our makeshift roadside party went on for, but it was an unexpected addition to the coffee sourcing itinerary. Huiiilaaa!

Day 3

Our caravan rolled into El Eden (1500MASL), a place that as the name suggests, was like a biblical paradise. Familiar faces of the Clearpath crew greeted our arrival, and the anticipation was at a fever pitch - we were about to overdose on coffee to make some green buying decisions.

We waited for the cupping rounds to be prepared for us, and as we wandered the premises to find a different scenery in each direction, the slightly tenser body language of our hosts made sense - this was the home that coferments built. Coferment or not, the decisions we were about to make to commit to a certain volume of coffee has a direct impact on the livelihoods of the family and local economy. Things were not allowed to go wrong.

But first, actual fruit. Whether to share the cultural heritage of Colombian fruits that don’t make it into North American markets, or to get our minds primed for the fruit bombs we’d be tasting soon, they were unique fruit bombs. Rinsing out mouths and lips, we picked up pencil and clipboard; it was time to do what we’d come for.

I’ve been in plenty of cupping scenarios, but this setup felt like a practiced F1 pit crew. 8-10 staff members moved in unison to set up 5 samples per offering, 14 samples per round, across 4 rounds. Up first, the dry sniffing round. Rodrigo dives in headfirst - nobody is more qualified to judge a representative sample than the name on the bag.

Hot water added, the room burst with the various aromas we’d smelled in the past few days. My memories of Glitch, LiLo, and Hydrangea offerings from Monteblanco that attracted me to coming here all came back to me. We picked up our spoons and the unique pitches of our slurps came together to form a questionable jam session.

There is a silent intensity throughout. Standard curriculum warns against disrupting or biasing others through emoting and distractions. Business deals are made off of this sensory exercise, and the notes logged are critical details. Sometimes we move quicker, sometimes we’re stuck in a traffic jam, sometimes we need a revisit for that 4th flavor note at the tip of our tongue; it’s a weird, polite, silent-but-loud dance. slurp

Notes were taken blind and lots were later revealed with a printed roster at the end of each round. Going into this trip, I thought I’d be tasting a fruit platter of coferments, but was surprised at how many cleaner offerings there were, as many for-reals washed as washed-ish. On the first roster sheet, I glimpsed the Ethiopian landrace and smiled at the memory of that surprise discovery only two days back; a clean bean born in the coferment kingdom.

Once each round’s reveals are made, a quick retrospective gives us the opportunity to compare notes, line by line. This is important - being polite and throwing generic notes does not help the roaster-producer relationship. What you dis/like about an offering, how you might find use it in a shop as an espresso-offering or as a seasonal offering, these are the in-person minutia that helps the producer understand the customer base. You can blind-buy green, roast it domestically and tell the producer what you thought, but they wouldn’t know what your roast tastes like to corroborate the opinion.

Unlike the rest of the crew and for better or worse, I am not a purchasing decision maker. My scope was to make suggestions to Hydrangea to select what would most suit their style. But being strict and selective is hard when each offering is presented to be more fun than the last. Personally, I’m no cupper and don’t live by SCA protocols or scoring. As a home roaster with an intended audience of one, I do my roasting QC closest to how I would actually brew. Nonetheless, it was a superb cupping session and out of the 54 offerings, I marked 8 as no-brainer buys, and 14 as appropriate picks for Hydrangea.

We’re just sipping coffee, but the day is long and the stakes are high; the brainpower applied is tiring for all. Thankfully it’s only 54 offerings, folks on other origin trips may be cupping upwards of 150 offerings in a day. From here, what’s left to do is narrow down the selection for final commitment, easier said than done. There is an aspect of urgency here. To be at origin means you are first to make the judgment call on if a lot is worth pursuing. You’re ahead in line of other roasters waiting on sample greens to be split off, ahead of an importer’s own grading and QC evaluation before they put a lot up for pre-ship sample requests, and you can throw down your commitment before a lot hits offering lists.

We’ve reached the end, and we take a breather to realize how much of a challenge it’ll be to cull down our wishlist down to a handful of committed options. But there’s one more surprise in wait for us. Andre, our local tour guide through the trip, had returned with Marianna Claros, reigning Queen of Huila, Miss Pitalito, and cultural ambassador. She closed out our day by playing us a song for us that she had recently written about coffee, Cafe Opita.

Day 4

No hilly mountains today, we’d be visiting the Clearpath mill in the in the Pitalito city area before going back to Bogota. At our hotel breakfast, I ran into Sarite, green buyer at Dak who I had met earlier in the year; the coffee world really is small. Folks from Cata exports were also staying at the same hotel, perhaps off to visit El Diviso.

Before heading out, we took inventory of beans we’d brought and split them up so nobody would be going home with what they’d brought. If you encounter me in person, you’ll know bean splitting is standard procedure.

The various entities in play so far may have been hard to keep track of, so here’s a quick recap:

Elkin Guzman, Rodrigo Sanchez, and Claudia Samboni (producer/wife of Rodrigo) are producers across Finca El Mirador, Finca Monteblanco, Las Veraneras, Las Nubes, El Eden, El Progreso, La Loma, and El Puente.
Aromas del Sur is the partnership between these farms and the exporter Clearpath. Their joint mill was built in 2019.
Clearpath, an exporter, partnered with Ally, a US-based importer, to make this trip happen.

This relationship between producer and logistics entity is a better-together strategy to tighten up operations and build trust with importer and roaster partners. Things go wrong in the coffee supply chain all the time. It used to be more common that funny business happened at the final milling stage, whether maliciously or through incompetence. A roaster may commit to a purchase based on an early sample, but as the production lot goes to the mill, it could get mishandled and the wrong thing shows up; frustrating and breeds distrust. The Clearpath mill only services lots that are within the partnership to mitigate shady interlopers, even if it’s suboptimal for making the most of the machinery they have. This is the part of traceability that we don’t consider as consumers and assume goes smoothly. This is also where it can start to get murky between farmgate prices (how much is paid directly to the farmer) and the usual subdivisions of cuts that gets taken for milling, transportation, and logistics. The Aromas del Sur partnership means that there’s a straight line of business you’re dealing with, and is a strong sign of power in the coffee supply chain they want us to witness.

But what is a mill? Once coffee is dried, it remains in a hulled state called parchment that needs to be removed. Mills are basically big friction vibrators to separate out the final form of green coffee, at ridiculous scale. It’s loud.

This is the easiest place to see that the floor plan of the building is dictated by the jobs to be done. The first machine does the broad strokes and dehusks the parchment shell. As it moves down the literal conveyor belt, the second machine polishes the bean and removes the tiny fragments.

Sorting happens here as well. An optical sorter runs through and identifies color defects to pneumatically knock out from the thousands of kilos of processed green. This is yet another step of material loss that increases the quality of green that arrives to the roaster. It’s desirable to the roaster and consumer, but hard to demand when the cost of machine, space for installation, and staff to operate it (color sorters are finnicky and sensitive to programming) is placed on the producer side, just to toss more material.

Certain varietals like java are too small for the gaps in the industrial machines. For those, they are sorted by hand. Undoubtedly, this is skilled labor for the volume they regularly work through. At home, I pick out defect beans on every roast and before grinding, but the pace their fingers pinch up anomalies is incomparably precise and lightning quick.

Upstairs is a QC lab. They sample roast on site and taste their lots, which is a good sign. We’d want to assume every producer goes through the labor and effort to iterate based on flavor, but that isn’t guaranteed everywhere. Sample roasting is hard, but even more expensive to set up. Cupping is good for evaluation, but isn’t quite the same as pourover and espresso methods. To be close to how their end-consumers are brewing the coffee, to be able to bring professional entities over to try and sample offerings with feedback, these are luxuries in the world of coffee production.

Flying in from Bogota, I could make out that certain hills were somehow involved with coffee. On the return trip out of Pitalito, the big picture was much clearer - how buildings are laid out in relation to one another, the scale of how much acreage yields what amount of coffee, how coffee moves through the hills to be processed; the producer’s supply chain in a single photo.

As big a deal as coferments are made out to be, you can tell by how small a fraction of this post is about them that there’s more to it than just the funny fruit processing. Coffee still needs be planted and harvested with care, to be processed as washed or natural, and to be milled; green coffee, clean washed or cofermented, gets purchased and sold in the same way. Seeing the secrets behind the soup was as exciting as I’d hoped it’d be, but also, logically sound and demystified; it feels no more mysterious than any other modern technique like dark room or carbonic maceration that requires infrastructure, equipment, and experimental trials to dial in. Perhaps that’s how it was meant to be - as arcane as your imagination wanted, fueled by moral opposition and controversy, but ultimately, exactly what it says on the bag.

Many thanks throughout this trip:

Aromas del Sur - Diana and Elkin, Claudia, Nathalia and Rodrigo, Fabian, Andres
The Clearpath crew - Juan, Cesar, Miguel, Andres, and guest star Marianna Claros
The Ally crew - Baylee, Gabby, Gabriel, Oscar, Daniel, Danny, Daniel
The roaster crew - Sam at Theory, Natalia and Quique at Diverso, Donovan at Anchor Tree (especially the shared media I can no longer detangle ownership of)
Brief, serendipitous encounters with Enki, Sarit
and Hydrangea for sending me to learn and share