Honey Peach Co-Ferment

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.

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.