Farm Info

The Catiope Strawberry Natural 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.

Catiope Strawberry Natural Process

Elkin and his team chose the CATIOPE variety for the Strawberry process thanks to its quality, yield, and good behaviour for experimental techniques, as it presents a good average of 20 Brix degrees. Catiope provides optimal levels of sweetness which allows the micro-organisms such as lactobacillus and saccharomyces cerevisiae to have an optimal fuel to work.

Elkin starts this 330-hour process by preparing the fermentation-started culture by mixing 40kgs of coffee cherries along with fresh locally picked strawberries and leaving them to ferment for 4 days (60 hours).

The selected 150kgs of catiope cherries are deposited in 200 litre plastic bins along with 10 liters of the starter mix solution and left sealed for 270 hours, creating an oxygen-depleted (anaerobic) environment.

After this long fermentation step, the coffee is removed from the containers and taken to the drying area where it is left in thin layers without moving it for the first 3 days. The following stage includes moving the drying coffee frequently every 3 hours until reaching the desired point of drying with the correct humidity between 10.5 to 11%.

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