Colombia Nolberto Olaya

True classic, this coffee. A staple for us, an everyday drinking coffee. There’s always room for gems like this one on the lineup here at Flip.

This coffee is produced by Nolberto. He is the third generation in his family to grow coffee, and has been working in coffee for 23 years. He’s been focusing on organic agriculture for the last 10 years, and has been teaching his children to work in the fields so that they may continue with the legacy- the family roasts coffee for themselves and sells roasted coffee in their community. Nolberto has been described as a real genius in organic agriculture- he sprays a fertilizing spray on his trees monthly, mixing Super Magro, worm leachate (the dark liquid that leaks out of a worm composting bin- it’s water released from the cells of decomposing scraps), and micro-organisms- he makes all of these products on his farm, and also sells them to his friends and neighbors.

Nolberto and his son Yefferson work closely together to identify the best processing techniques for each lot. Yefferson has trained as a sample roaster and cupper. The coffee first begins its fermentation process from within the cherry (natural bacteria enter through the tip where the cherry is picked) in a cherry ferment. The cherries are kept in a sealed Grain Pro bag, and Nolberto combines two days of picking and the end of the second day to have enough volume to process. He washes and floats all of the cherries in water to remove the under- and over-ripe cherries (and to homogenize the temperature of all of the cherries). From there, he de-pulped the coffee and left it for 100 hours (!) in sealed pickle barrels (with valves for gasses to exit the vessels). Careful measurements showed Nolberto and Yefferson that when the pickle barrels are properly sealed, the maximum temperature in the pickle barrel only gets up to 18 C. From there, the coffee is dried on their raised beds in a parabolic dryer, where it’s rotated regularly for up to 25 days, depending on the weather conditions.

First sip, instant juiciness of red currants. This then leads to the complexity and sweetness of perfectly poached red apple. This coffee’s very red, yes it is. Rounding all this juiciness off is a refined finish of sweet demerara. We could do this every day.