Colombia Luis Alberto - Bourbon Aruzi, Washed

Tastes Like: Green Apple, Fig Aniseed

Producer: Luis Alberto
Farm: Finca San Miguel
Region: Cauca
Municipality: Inza
Harvested: May to July
Variety: Bourbon Aruzi
Altitude: 1952 MASL
Process: Washed

In 2008, Luis Alberto was displaced from his home in Tumaco due to the inner violence of Colombia. He arrived with his wife, Mariluz, to Inza in Cauca. There, he started his new live with coffee, where he bought a farm which he named Agua Clara (Clear Water). Around 2019 he shifted his focus to high quality coffee. Currently at the farm he lives with his wife and children, where the coffee production is a family business. Luis Alberto is a firm believer in protecting the environment and for him "coffee is a crop that doesn't require chemical, fi you do things correctly the results are going to
be good". For him, his farm is special because of the climate, the quality of the soil and the ecosystem he has. The mayor challenge he faces is transforming his farm and making it full on organic. Luis Alberto wants to maintain his quality, which has been consistent throughout the years.

For his coffee process, Luis Alberto starts with a careful cherry picking, always looking for the ripest. Then, the cherries are taken to wet mill at the farm where he floats them so that he can take any defective cherries and foreign material such as small sticks or leaves. This is followed by an in- cherry fermentation, where Luis Alberto places the cherries in bags and leaves them there from 24 to 30 hours under shade. Afterwards, he pulps the cherries and proceeds to ferment the coffee in closed plastic containers for a period of 40 hours. When ready he washes the coffee unless he is doing a honey process. Following this, he takes the coffee to his drying area, a two-level covered raised bed. Luis Alberto first places the coffee in the bottom bed for a shade drying and then, he moves the coffee to the upper bed to finish the drying process which in total is going to take 15 to 20 days.