Neighbors & crops
INES ARAQUE
SAN ISIDRO
Village: Anatoli, Cundinamarca
Altitude: 1600 M.A.S.L
Variety: Castillo
The Profile
Ines is 60 years old, and have been producing Coffee for the last 20 years. She bought her farm along with her husband and started producing coffee as familiar tradition. El Porvenir is a 1-hectare estate where Ines has at least 1600 coffee plants, mainly Castillo variety. She also diversifies her income by producing plantain and citric fruits.
Ines has 4 children, two of them help her on the farm, they do the maintenance and other farming labors. Their other 2 are independent and work in the urban area.
Before joining the Neighbors & Crops program Ines used to sell her coffee to local buyers and to the National Coffee Federation. Furthermore, she told us that he found very difficult to do the wet and drying process as it took a lot of his time and it was even worse in rainy seasons.
With the Neighbors & Crops program we offer her our trained team of pickers during harvest, we transport the coffee cherries to our wet mill, and because of her lack of processing infrastructure, she no longer has to hurriedly find a way to process and dry her cherries.
Key Facts
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Proccesing Methods
Lactic
This kind of fermentation is classified as ‘Anaerobic’ as oxygen has minimal interaction with the cherry. Once the cherries arrive at the mill, they are hand sorted and placed in sealed tanks. With no oxygen involved, bacteria feed on carbohydrates present in the mucilage favoring a higher concentration of Lactic Acid, creating a unique profile of the resulting cup.
Honey
The Honey Process begins with a pre-fermentation stage of 45 hours at the wet mill. From here the cherries will start the de-pulping stage, passing through three stages of quality control before removing a percentage of the skin. While the drying stage, coffee will be placed in African-style raised beds for over 15 days. Due to the levels of sugar and moisture, the first days will be crucial to avoid microbial activity prolongation. Finally parchment coffee will pass through the mechanical drying machines to end up the drying process.
Mixed
This method involves a combination of stages found in lactic and acetic processing methods. First, all hand-sorted cherries will go through a short pre-fermentation step. Similar to lactic processing, the cherries are placed in airtight fermentation tanks with limited oxygen. Once removed from the tanks, we pass them through three levels of quality control before having the skin removed by a pulper machine. From there, we leave the beans resting in the fermentation tanks to undergo an acetic fermentation, agitating them from time to time. Once the process is completed, the beans are transferred to African-style raised beds to begin the drying phase.
Our Mixed Fermentation Processing produces a very balanced cup profile with medium to heavy body.
Bio-Innovation
Through the Bioinnovation process, La Palma & El Tucán honors the main principles of organic farming. They first capture and reproduce microorganisms found in their farm’s beautiful forests, to create their own fermentation substrate. Then, they mix this substrate with perfectly ripen geisha cherries, in a clay pot for 100 hours. This combination allows them to create a sustainable closed cycle. After the fermentation, they remove the leftovers and reuse them as compost.
If you wish to request additional information about the processing of your microlot, such as fermentation time or type of drying, please let us know by filling this form.
We will get back to you soon with detailed information.
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