Visiting Finca Croqueta

We were warmly welcomed into the houses of passionate coffee people. We rode on horseback through coffee trees beneath a moonlit sky. And most of all, we learned so much in only seven days. 

One year down the road at Sucafina I was lucky enough to get the opportunity to travel to Colombia with a group of four roasters. Sucafina was invited there by the Federación Nacional de Cafeteros (FNC) for the occasion of Expo Especiales in Medellín at the start of October. Before the expo, we had the chance to cruise through the Antioquia and Huila regions. On Monday, we flew from Bogotá to Neiva in the Huila department in the Andes region, to visit three producers in the mountains above Ikira. In the three hour minivan ride we made acquaintance with the audacious driving style of the Colombians. Luckily we could focus on the impressive and immensely diverse scenery we were flying past. Apparently everything grows in the region of Huila. After coffee, rice and fruit make up the biggest part of agricultural production. When we were visiting, the region was going through an extra dry and hot period because of the weather phenomenon El Niño, which spurred a lot if forest fires. The phenomenon significantly raises surface temperatures in central and eastern areas around the tropical Pacific. Its counterpart La Niña brings high humidity and lower temperatures. This oscillation means trouble for agriculture, but for coffee production, the drought of El Niño isn’t that bad (unless it lasts too long of course – El Niño can last until April). Trees are put under stress due to lower water content in the soil, so when the rains arrive this spurs a massive flowering on the coffee trees. La Niña on the other hand means massive Roya plagues. 

In the car, we were accompanied by Ivan, who is an extensionista at the FNC. The extensionistas give technical, social, economic and environmental support to the farmers on a local level. The ride was a perfect occasion to question him on the more technical side of coffee production. We just had to ask the big Castillo vs. Caturra question. Castillo is a Caturra X Híbrido de Timor crossbreed created in breeding programs of Cenicafé, the research leg of the FNC. It’s an improved version of the Colombia hybrid and is resistant to diseases like Roya, hence warmly embraced by coffee producers. Castillo also has a high yield and has seven regional varieties, which are adapted to the specific requirements of the producers. Caturra is a natural mutation of the Bourbon variety, and is typically considered to be of higher cup quality. According to test cuppings by the Panel de Catación de la Oficina de Calidades (cupping panel of the quality control office) of the FNC, in which ten organoleptic attributes of Castillo where evaluated, Castillo can easily rival the traditional Typica, Caturra, Bourbon and Tabi varieties. Of bigger importance are the conditions in which the trees grow, the cherry selection process, the quality of the water used in fermentation and pulping and the final drying practices. This year, a program was launched by World Coffee Research and CRS Coffeelands with collaboration of several US roasters and buyers to perform an intensive sensory analysis of Castillo and Caturra. Find out more about this on the Coffeelands blog.  

Next question we sought an answer to was why Colombian coffee often ages so fast. This has to do a lot with improper and rushed drying practices. Ivan told us they were putting a lot of emphasis on controlling the temperature in drying installations to a temperature around 40°C. Drying at this temperature enables a slower and more homogeneous drying so the core of the bean is properly dried as well. Temperatures in covered drying tunnels often reach 50°C when there’s no proper airflow. At this temperature, the core of the bean isn’t dried properly, and the moisture that is locked inside is released afterwards, when the beans have matured. This leads to flat taste sensations often found in commercial grade coffee. Another factor that probably contributes to those flat cups and rapid aging is the heat produced by the machines when beans are hulled on a large scale. We noticed this when visiting the dry mill in Neiva. Due to the speed of the process in the machine, the beans get heated up again, which isn’t too good for coffee quality. It’s once again a choice of efficiency or quality. 

We had to halt our bumpy ride because a truck was blocking the road. Apparently, they were consolidating the road, so we couldn’t pass with the van. Luckily, a jeep and three motorcycles were waiting for us a bit further on. Adding a dash of adventure to the trip, we continued our way on motorcycles and in the jeep. We cruised through air thick with the perfume of coffee blossoms and the smell of fruit, while being deeply impressed with stunning views as far as you could see. Just imagine waking up and seeing this every day when looking out your window. 

Our first visit was at Jesus Hernan Ledesma’s finca. He owns a 5-hectare farm mainly planted with Castillo and Caturra and produces around 2 ton of microlot coffee per year. He had recently replanted with Castillo because coffee leaf rust (CLR) hit his plants badly, even at altitudes around 1800 meters above sea level. Yet, it was clear this didn’t get him down. They managed to contain the CLR to a small area and all other lots were in great condition, heavy with cherries and blossoms, wearing a healthy jacket of leaves. In the high season in the first semester, Jesus employs eleven pickers. Otherwise, he covers the farm together with his family. In order to only harvest the ripe cherries, he passes by the same plants again every other week. We were invited to pick cherries with him, which really multiplied our respect for the pickers. The trees were planted on steep mountain flanks and were difficult to access. Of course they are used to this, but we surely had a hard time keeping on our feet, especially with a collection basket in between your legs! After a round of picking, we took our cherries to the beneficio at the farm, to see how this works. He explained he double ferments the beans, with a dry and a wet round. The next day, we got to cup the result of this at Almacafé in Neiva and it surely made for interesting cups! For me and a couple others in our gang, this was the first time ever we saw a coffee tree, coffee blossoms or cherries live. Definitely an experience that will linger in our heads a long time!  

After seeing the manual pulping installation and the drying beds, we continued on to Don Eduardo’s finca. He also had Castillo and Caturra growing on 15 hectares, about 50 meters higher than Jesus’ farm. (Yes we were measuring heights with every step we made – thank you technology). It was impressive to see just how much blossoms these trees were carrying. Less cherries here, so a more uniform growth. The pulping system here was more automated. On the three farms we visited that day, we saw three different pulping systems. Don Eduardo used a traditional pulper with higher water use. Here, the cherry skin is ripped from the parchment bean, after which the mucilage is rinsed off before landing in the fermentation tank. The next farm, Don Octavio’s, was equipped with a Penagos pulper, which uses only 5% of the water used in a traditional pulper. The cherry skin is torn off again, but instead of washing the mucilage off in the next step, it is swirled off in a centrifuge-like barrel. Without using water, the beans are cleaned and ready for fermentation. 

At Don Octavio’s house, we were invited for almuerzo, prepared by his wife in the outdoor kitchen. We were served a delicious and huge typical lunch: a stew/soup and a big plate of meat, rice, vegetables and plantains, which could easily have filled up two stomachs! No wonder they normally serve this to their pickers to give them energy for a day’s work. Enjoying a hearty meal while overlooking the mountains – life can be worse! After lunch, the motorcycles took us back down to the roadworks, where our minivan was waiting for us. Turned out our driver was only just warming up in the morning. On the way back, we often squeezed our buttocks tight when he made another manuevre, but we made it to our destination in one piece. 

On Tuesday morning we were expected at Almacafé in Neiva for a cupping of fresh harvests they had already received from producers. By lucky coincidence or not, the farms we had visited the day before featured among the eleven samples on the table. It was very educational to link the farm conditions we saw the day before to the quality of the cups on the table. First impressions can be misguiding!  

Next-door to Almacafé lies Cafetrilla, a commercial dry mill, where trucks were dropping loads of bags with parchment coffee. Here, coffees are hulled, sorted, graded and prepared for export. We had already seen the cultivation, pulping and drying of coffee, and later on we’d see the fermentation process, so we were pretty excited this mill wanted to open its doors to us and let us nose around. The first peek inside the office surprised us a lot. Behind a desk, a woman was manually counting defects for every sample she received! Bearing in mind the numbers of bags that were arriving at the mill, we contemplated her painstaking task for a moment. In Western countries, this person would probably have been replaced by a machine to reduce labor costs a long time ago. This was something that struck us on multiple occasions during our time in Colombia; we got the impression a lot of small jobs were created across the country, just so people could have an income. One thing was certain, the lots at this mill all underwent a rigorous quality check before they were bought! Samples were hulled in a mini mill, screened and defects were counted manually. Based on this, the seller of the coffee to the mill gets his final price.  

With our helmets and masks on we moved on to the main hall where all the machinery was in full operation. It was really impressive to see coffee being processed on such a large scale. There were lines and lines of density tables, big screening installations making our sample screeners look really silly, tubes above our heads and enormous machines everywhere, covered in a thick layer of coffee dust. In a separate room, away from all the dust, coffee was sorted by advanced machines using light, lasers, air and photographic technology to remove all the unwanted beans for a specified quality. Quite the contrast with the sample lady in the front room! In an adjoining room they kept a couple of sorting tables to clean the lots out even further in case a buyer orders an extra manual cleaning. After this tour we headed back to Neiva airport, we said goodbye to our crazy driver and jumped on the plain to Medellín in the Antioquia region. 

On Wednesday we went on a farm-visiting trip, organized by Proexport, together with a group of coffee people from all over the world. A bus took us through Antioquia, from Medellín to the municipality of Titiribí. The Antioquia government had just opened the first of many education centers there. The idea behind these centers is to give the people in the remote, mountainous coffee regions access to education and to spread knowledge on all things coffee-related among producers. Since coffee is one of the most important crops in the region, the government wants to make sure coffee cultivation practices are preserved and passed on to future generations. Through these centers and different programs, they want to make coffee production interesting for the new generation so they can take over their parents’ farms in the future. 

From the tree to the cup – all that’s left now is locking myself up in a container to experience what it feels like to be a coffee bean during its long journey 

~Ivan