So lets start with some background info on the farm itself and later next week, all going well, we will sample roast our first few batches and talk about the results on the cupping table. How exciting...
Owner Julio Peralta, envisages a sustainable future for Nicaraguan coffee through the export and promotion of individual micro lots. Julio - a farmer who heads up the speciality grower and roaster ‘Peralta Coffees’ - has encouraged family members and fellow farmers to explore new ways of growing coffee and firmly believes his country possesses the complex conditions and technical facilities needed to create extraordinary flavours in the cup. As a result of this dedicated approach, there are now several of his family farms working toproduce distinct characteristics by marketing individual lots as opposed to bulking everything together for export. Several of the farms involved in this practice have been award winning at the Cup of Excellence competitions in recent years.
the process of producing micro lots, Julio hopes to obtain information which will enable him to make decisions as to which varieties and which processes work best in each farm and plot. As a company, we are keen to encourage Julio and his family’s farms to implement creative thinking into their coffee production in order to add value and quality to the crops grown there. The results achieved last year were truly outstanding and with the on-going threat of ‘roya’ and a volatile world market, this venture will hopefully contribute towards safeguarding coffee farmers in Nicaragua for the long-term.
To decide which plots are to be harvested as micro lots, a brix refractometer is used to measure the sugar content of the cherries across different areas in each farm - this should ideally be around 22 per cent. Once this has taken place, the plots can be selected and the first stage of each process is to use a water siphon to select the best quality cherries and separate defect fruits. If the lot is to be honey processed, cherries are manually pulped and left to dry for a number of days (exact drying time differs across each farm) with the mucilage intact. For the natural processed lots, fully ripe cherries are hand-picked and left to dry with both pulp and mucilage intact for a longer period of time. For each micro lot we have selected, the entire drying process takes place on raised drying beds or in a parabolic dryer at the San Ignacio mill in the municipality of Mozonte in the region of Nueva Segovia. The quality control at San Ignacio is second to none having benefited from visits by Falcon’s milling expert Jeremy Wakeford, who has made a number of improvements to bring about greater consistency and a better overall cup profile.
Such dedication to processing has resulted in the creation of some incredible flavour profiles which produce a cup that is consistently clean.
Ok enough rambling lets get this green into our Diedrich sample roaster so we can cup and
evaluate the landed coffee. Stay tuned...