Producer Info
Palestina, Huila, Colombia | 1600 masl | Pink Bourbon – Washed
Efren Echeverri is a young coffee entrepreneur who’s decided to bet on the post-harvest processing to standarize cup profiles and offer repeatability.
The coffees processed at Efren’s wet mill come from his own farm, as well as from his relatives and neighbors in Palestina.
All the coffees are from the municipality of Palestina, an area well know for the specificity of its terroir. Indeed in Palestina most coffee farms are shaded, an agricultural practice becoming very rare in Colombia since the introduction of shadeless monoculture. Efren tells us some producers have tried to remove the shade trees but soon realized that the exposed soil would suffer from eiter too much sun or too much rain, and the vast majority of producers agree that shade is a necessity for soil protection and healthy coffee plantations.
One of the symbols of shade in coffee farms in the cachingo, a tall tree with red leavesthat colours the mountains of Huila, as represented on the right on Efren’s house mural.
Back in 2020, Efren took a course with Julian Cucuñame in Cauca to learn about the science of fermentation which he then started applying to the cherries he produces or buys. Efren specializes in the making of mosto, a liquid that results from the fermentation of fruits (coffee cherries or other fruits) with sugar in a low oxygen environment. The purpose of the mosto is to cultivate the positive bacterial load present in fruits and enhance a coffee’s flavour potential.
The preparation of the mosto takes about 10 days and the Ph and temperature are monitored and adjusted every 6 hours. For cleanliness, it is essential that the fruits be at optimum ripeness and uniform, and and that they go through a cleaning process that excludes chemicals.
This mosto lot is co fermented with a mosto of coconut and figs.
Another recent experimentation run by Efren is the production of organic fertilizers using microorganisms present in the shaded and biodiverse farm of his stepfather. He adjusts his knowledge of the mosto to cultivate the bacterial load of microorganisms.
His first empirical conclusions are that this type of nutrition boosts the growth and health of the coffee trees very rapidly, and has allowed him to halve the use of synthetic fertilizers while maintaining productivity.
