Story
This coffee comes from our friends at Equation coffee. Each season we comb through the samples they send our way, and we slowly build some regional lots as well as some farm separations that make up our blends. This coffee was flagged for us as a single farm lot, when we cupped this in our lab we separated it out for our first single origin release from our partnership.
Here’s what our friends say about the history of Bautista and Finca El Guamito:
“Bautista Dizu grew up in a coffee producing family. When he was 18 years old, he left the farm and went to work in the town. Eight years ago, Bautista decided to go back to the farm. He decided to work the farm in a different way, having a highly productive farm, focused on specialty coffees and finding clients that value coffee quality. He has been working successfully with specialty coffees being able to sell the coffee at higher prices and to invest these resources in the farm. Bautista and his wife are in charge of working every day in the farm, being the ones that pick the coffee, depulp and dry the coffee. They invest a lot of energy in producing a high quality coffee because they want the consumers in the world to taste excellent coffee from their farm.”
WASHED PROCESSED COFFEES
The washed process begins with coffee cherries delivered to the washing station, both from the primary market or from farmers bringing their coffee directly to the mill. The cherries are inspected, and an initial quick round of hand-sorting separates the defective coffees before placing them into the hopper. They are then funneled to the disc pulper, which removes the fruit from the seeds (beans). After that phase is done, the coffee is fermented underwater for approximately 24 hours, then atypically a second day’s harvest is added on top of this fermentation. This provides ideal PH for an extended fermentation within the tanks. Once the 48-hour fermentation is complete, the parchment is emptied into the washing channels, where it is agitated with rakes. During this step, the water is refreshed twice. Once the washing is complete, the coffee undergoes the traditional “double wash,” where it rests in the soaking tank for another 12 hours, before being taken to the raised drying tables for sun drying.
DRY MILLING
Once the coffee is picked, processed, and dried, it still has a necessary step before it's ready for export. Dried coffee, which we refer to as parchment. The final processing stage is not only to remove the dried layer of parchment from the seed, but it's also a stage in many levels of quality checks that coffee passes through in Colombia. The first stage is hulling and de-stoning, removing the parchment as well as any chips of drying beds that may have gotten into the coffee. Parchment is separated by air and used as a fuel source for other stages of milling that may require heat. Once the seeds are hulled, they're then separated by size or screen size. The screens they pass through, and the final prep size is dictated by contract specifications. From sizing, the coffees are then separated by density, as a final check that the exportable green coffee is homogeneous before it gets to the roaster. Density is separated on a densimetric table. This is a clever bit of technology that allows more dense seeds to climb up, while the less dense coffees are separated off the bottom. Density is extremely important when it comes to roasting, as less dense coffees tend to roast at a different rate than denser, leading to uneven roasts. The final stage is a visual check, done by an optical sorter. Coffee is passed at a high rate of speed through a vertical chute, where cameras capture color and visual info about the coffee, quickly separating seeds that don't meet standards with a puff of air. As technology continues to evolve in coffee, preparation gets better and better, improving cup quality by many points…