Caturra · 96h Anaerobic · Mosto Natural · 1,750–1,950 m.a.s.l.
Oscar Hernández is the third generation on Los Nogales, settled by his grandparents outside Pitalito in 1952 and first place in the 2005 Cup of Excellence. Trained in environmental management, he has run it since 2013 as a working laboratory — trialling varietals, refining ferments, conserving the forest and water the farm depends on.
Full, faintly creamy body. Floral aromatics lead. The acidity is lime-bright, the sweetness runs to candied citrus and white chocolate. Aromatic rather than punchy — a coffee you smell before you taste.
First time?The most perfumed coffee we make. If you like Riesling, Gewürztraminer or a good jasmine tea, you already have the reference. If what you want is dark and roasty, start with the Uganda 48h instead.
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Starts with this coffee · rotating microlots & experimental ferments
$34
Flower cone dripperbox 1
$18
Cupping spoonmonth 2on box 1
$12
Dosing ringmonth 2on box 1
$24
Double-wall glassmonth 3on box 1
$10
Dosing cupbox 2
$18
Handheld frothermonth 3Pause, skip or cancel anytime
The lot file
Why this lot
1 · Twenty seconds of heat. The cherries are brought to 80 °C for twenty seconds, then plunged cold. It is, precisely, a pasteurization: it strips off the wild yeast and bacteria the fruit picked up in the field, and it frees the sugars the ferment will feed on. Most natural coffees are fermented by whatever happened to be in the air that day. This one isn’t.
2 · The farm’s own culture. With the cherry clean, the only thing left to drive the ferment is a starter the farm made itself — its mosto, the fermented juice of its own coffee cherries, held back from the previous Caturra harvest and layered over this one. A sourdough starter, for coffee. No foreign fruit, no infusion, no flavoring: the native microorganisms of Los Nogales, carried forward batch to batch.
3 · Ninety-six hours, sealed and cold. Four days in a sealed tank held at a steady 18 °C. Long enough to build the banana, rose and candied citrus. Controlled enough that the Caturra and the 1,900 metres still come through underneath it. That is the whole point of the exercise — the process doesn’t cover the farm, it amplifies it.
What goes wrong
Long ferments drift. Wild yeast picked up in the field takes over, and the cup arrives boozy, vinegary, or faintly of solvent — the reason “fermenty” is still a criticism in specialty coffee.
Los Nogales removes the variable rather than managing it. Twenty seconds at 80 °C strips the field microbes off the cherry. What ferments it instead is the farm’s own mosto — the fermented juice of its previous Caturra harvest, held back like a sourdough starter. Sealed, 18 °C, ninety-six hours. Nothing random gets a vote.
What it cost us
Specialty coffee talks about price and almost never about cost. Here is ours for this lot, straight off the importer's invoice.
| Green, up to our door | $36.00 / kg |
|---|---|
| Roast loss ~16% | $42.86 / kg roasted |
That is the invoiced price of the green, plus what it costs to move it from the port to our roastery. Roasting then drives off water and chaff — about 16% of the weight — so a kilo of roasted coffee starts as roughly 1.19 kg of green.
How to brew it
We roast a single omni profile per lot — light-medium, developed to work in a cone, in a press and in a portafilter. Not a compromise between them: one correct roast for the coffee, then a brew method chosen to suit it.
| Method | Ratio | Water | Grind | Time |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Filter | 1:16 | 198 °F | Coarse · 800–1,000 µm | ~3:15 (45 s bloom) |
| Immersion | 1:14 | 190 °F | Medium · 600–800 µm | ~2:45 (45 s bloom) |
| Espresso | 1:2.5 | 198 °F | Fine · 200–300 µm | 28–34 s |
Why lower pressure on espresso. A light-medium omni roast pushed at a full 9 bar throws its acidity and its bitterness at you at once. Pull it at 6–7 bar with an extended 8–12 second pre-infusion — wetting the bed evenly before extraction starts softens both ends and lets the fruit through. No pressure control? Grind a little coarser and pull longer: 1:2.5 rather than 1:2.
Sharp, boozy or thin at the finish? Go one step coarser and drop to 190 °F. Flat or hollow? Go finer first, and only then up to 199 °F. Change one thing at a time.
Rest. We rest every roast 5–7 days before it ships, so it arrives ready. These lots keep opening up after that — give a bag ten days off roast before you judge it.
Meet the producer
Four generations at Los Nogales in Pitalito, Huila — first place in Colombia's 2005 Cup of Excellence. Oscar Fernando Hernández now ferments on the farm's own native-microbe culture, saved batch to batch like a sourdough starter.
Small-batch roasting
How this coffee was made
Colombia · Pitalito, Huila · Caturra · 1,750–1,950 m · Hernández family, Finca Los Nogales
Tropical fruit · Banana · Rose · Tangerine
Ripe cherries are picked and sorted by density.
A thermal shock treatment at 80 °C for 20 seconds is applied, to open the pores and release the sugars.
Cherries are fermented in oxygen-free sealed tanks for 96 hours, with a coffee-cherry fermentation starter liquid saved from a previous lot.
Drying takes 2 to 4 days; beans are separated and then rest 15 days before leaving the farm.
Selected beans are roasted with precision to unlock their unique flavour characteristics.
Customer reviews
5.0 out of 5 · 1 review
Some good shit ngl
