Farm Info

This special lot of Catiope Bourbon Nectar Yellow Fruits is harvested and produced at El Mirador, located in the town of Pitalito in Huila, Colombia, owned by Elkin Guzman. The farm includes a broad collection of varieties such as Catiope, Mokka, Gesha, Bourbon, Caturra, and Tabi, which is a variety developed and released in 2020 in Colombia by Cenicafe by crossing the varietals; Bourbon, Typica, and the Timor Hybrid.

In the world of differentiated coffees, Elkin and his team have been experimenting and evaluating variables that help improve the quality of the coffees they handle to offer an excellent drink for coffee consumers worldwide for more than 13 years.
The area of the farm is 31 hectares, with sandy-loam and clay-loam soils with good organic matter conditions that aid in the excellent nutrition of their coffee trees. El Mirador is managed under semi-shade systems to optimize temperature regulation and the effect of photosynthesis in coffee plantations.

Elkin has been dedicated to researching and developing post-harvest processing techniques. All this research and experience has brought Elkin to develop multiple processing techniques depending on an individual lot of coffee, including Carbonic Maceration, Lactic and Acetic Natural processes, and Natural Hydro Honey.

Catiope Bourbon Nectar Process

Elkin and his team chose the Catiope and Bourbon varieties for this process thanks to their quality, yield and good behaviour for experimental techniques, including their optimal levels of sweetness which allows the micro-organisms such as lactobacillus and saccharomyces cerevisiae to have optimal fuel to work. An oxygen-depleted (anaerobic) fermentation is generated when both the starter culture and the coffee are mixed and placed into sealed containers for the scheduled fermentation time.

These micro-organisms are initially cultivated separately before incorporating them into the coffee, giving way to a large scale where a significant volume of starter culture is produced.

For this specific process, a total of 80 litres of starter culture is extracted from a 200-litre drum which had been mixed with the nectar of yellow fruits. This allows the Brix degrees of the initial mix to be equal to that of the coffee cherries.

The starter culture takes 8 days to reach its optimal state, exactly 190 hours of fermentation.
Besides the nectar of yellow fruits, Elkin feeds the yeasts with an energy base such as molasses and brown sugar until the desired level of fermentation is achieved.

After the cherries are picked from his lots at El Mirador, they get pulped and deposited inside a fully sealed 200-litre plastic can along with the 80 litres of the fermented nectar solution that had been previously prepared.

The coffee starts then to ferment for 150 hours, and the team constantly measures the Brix degrees to not drop below 6 as well as the pH levels which are not allowed to drop below 4: this is the balance point for the coffee in order to highlight the notes of yellow fruits.