Colombia, Julio Calderón Coffee Beans

We partnered with La Real Expedición Botánica (LaREB) to help source this stunner of a coffee from Juilo Calderón. LaREB has been working with Juilo for a few years now, helping him sell his coffee to roasters like us. We knew we wanted to buy this coffee as soon as we tasted it.

Julio farms in La Esperanza which is located in the Palestina region of Huila, Colombia. This area is well known for its fertile volcanic soil, high altitude, and smaller micro-lots, which helps produce higher quality, clean, well-acidic, aromatic coffees. Julio experiments a lot with fermentation. For this Gesha coffee he picked slightly overripe cherries and fermented them in husk for 24 hours. Then he performed a 48 hour anoxic dry mass fermentation. Anoxic dry mass fermentation is fermenting the coffee with the coffee mucilage in an environment without oxygen. The sugars in the mucilage (and sometimes intact fruit pulp, if whole cherry) fuel the microbes, so there is no need for water to perform this fermentation.

Julio primarily grows Gesha coffees and sticks with some variation of a washing process, with carefully controlled fermentation. This coffee speaks for itself with its balanced sweetness and insane amount of clarity.