Colombia
Huila
Rodrigo Sanchez Valencia and Claudia Samboni
Finca La Loma
Pacamara
Anaerobic Double Fermentation Washed
December 2019
Pineapple Juice, Lemon, Apple, Cocoa Nib
1650 meters
N/A
25kg with liner
SOLD OUT
Finca La Loma is located in Vereda Agua Negra in the Pitalito municipality of Huila. The farm has 12 hectares planted with many varieties, including Caturra, Variedad Colombia, Pink Bourbon, Pacamara, Laurina, and Geisha. The mill on the farm includes a depulper and tanks for dry fermentation. Producers Rodrigo Sanchez Valencia and Claudia Samboni have been cultivating coffee on La Loma since 2011.
In 2017, Rodrigo and his team at Aromas del Sur—the parent company for La Loma, El Progreso, and Monteblanco farms and the Aromas del Sur dry mill—constructed a cupping lab on La Loma to facilitate sample roasting, crop evaluation, and sourcing at origin. The lab overlooks the farm and the valley of Pitalito, with coffee trees and other crops dotting the rolling landscape.
The Pacamara variety originally comes from El Salvador and is a cross between Pacas, a natural mutation of Bourbon, and Maragogipe, a natural mutation of Typica. Rodrigo planted many varieties on La Loma to conduct his own localized studies of which varieties perform well in the farm’s climate conditions. He introduced Pacamara to La Loma in 2016 and continues to investigate which processing methods are best suited to this variety in this location.
This lot of Pacamara cherries destined for Double Fermentation Anaerobic Washed Processing was harvested at 21 degrees Brix, a measurement used to indicate sugar content. The first fermentation is aerobic, with coffee fermenting in cherry for 40 hours in the harvest sacks. Next, floaters are removed and coffee is depulped then left to ferment for an additional 100 hours, this time in a sealed tank with zero oxygen for an anaerobic fermentation, before being washed and transferred to the solar dryer for 5 days. Coffee completes the drying process on shaded beds for another 22 days until it reaches 10.5-11% humidity.
The goal of Double Fermentation is to bring out the sweetness and complexity of the coffee. As long as the cherries do not exceed 23 degrees Brix to begin with, the fermentation phases of the Double Fermentation process can increase Brix readings by as much as 4 degrees, provided that the pH does not drop below 5 and disrupt the equilibrium between body and acidity. This lot was dry milled at the Aromas del Sur facility in Pitalito.
Read more about coffee at the nearby Finca Monteblanco and new Aromas del Sur processing innovations.
The Colombian Department of Huila is located in the southern portion of the country where the Central and Eastern ranges of the Andes mountains converge. Huila’s capital city of Neiva is dry, flat, and desert-like, markedly different from the coffee regions further south.
Centered around the city of Pitalito, Huila’s coffee farms are predominantly smallholder owned and over the past ten years have made concerted efforts to produce specialty coffee that reveals the full character of the region’s terroir. Selective manual harvesting, attentive processing, and careful post-harvest sorting all contribute to increasing recognition of the region.
Huila’s Departmental coffee committee, the local connection to the national Colombian Coffee Growers Federation, has invested notable resources into training producers in everything from fertilization to roasting. This, combined with producer enthusiasm, has created a regional culture of quality-focused production.
Huila holds important historic significance dating back to pre-Columbian cultures. The archeological site at San Agustin includes a large number of stone carvings, figures, and artifacts that offer a rare glimpse into the land’s past prior to colonialism.
