Hacienda Colima - Anaerobic Natural Costa Rica

"process-driven coffee with intense notes of grape bubblegum, whiney and long chocolate truffle after taste"

The Farm

Finca Colima is a farm located at the edges of the Brava Volcano. New coffee trees are planted in a very fertile volcanic soil at an altitude of more than 1,200 metres. The soil benefits from a good organic matter and texture that produces a well-balanced coffee with quite a chocolatey profile. The coffee is shade-grown and harvested from November to March.  

Process

For this batch, the coffee is fermented, in cherries, in tanks in which the oxygen is removed and replaced by CO2. After fermenting for 5 days, at a temperature of 18°C, the coffee is placed on raised beds and blended daily, between 8am and 2pm.

The coffee is then covered to retain maximum heat until the following morning. The operation lasts until a humidity level of between 11.5 and 10.5% is reached.

The H1 variety is a hybrid between the Ethiopian Sudan Rume and the highly rust-resistant T5296. It was first planted on Alejo's farm in 2013.

Alejo Castro

Coffee production began in America in the mid-19th-century. It was at that same time that two pioneering families originally from Europe set up a coffee business, the Spanish Castro-Jimenez family in Costa Rica and the German Kahle family in the Chiapas region of Mexico. Alejo belongs to the fifth generation of the Castro-Kahle family, which has been growing coffee on the slopes of the Poas Volcano in central Costa Rica for more than 100 years. Coffee is not a specialty for the Castro-Kahle clan, but a tradition. They cultivate Caturra, Catuai, Geisha, SL28, Villasarchi, Sarchimor, Obata, San Isidro and Venecia. The family has chosen to conserve some 200 hectares of forest located above their coffee fields in order to preserve the local biodiversity. They have also bought 1,500 hectares of primary forest in the Osa Peninsula in the south of the country. Fauna and flora are sacrosanct in Costa Rica, and according to Alejo it must be what gives the coffee so much flavour. The soils on the slopes of the Poas Volcano are enriched with the volcanic dust that falls after each eruption. Alejo has a real passion for the different coffee varieties and processes, and each year tries his hand at innovating, combining, concocting and refining his coffees just like an alchemist.