Finca Campo Hermoso is a 15-hectare farm outside of Circasia, only a few kilometers north of Quindío’s capital city Armenia. It’s owner, Edwin Noreña, is an agroindustrial engineer by trade with graduate-level studies in biotechnology. Edwin is a well-connected and highly aspirational coffee producer who focuses on cultivating very specific varieties paired with very specific processing methods designed to express the most surprising, memorable, and delicious coffees possible within his resources. Finca Campo Hermoso concentrates on growing a wide variety of coffee cultivars, including pink bourbon, yellow bourbon, yellow caturra, bourbon sidra, gesha, and Cenicafe 1, a resistant hybrid developed by Cenicafé, Colombia’s national coffee research institute. The resulting coffees are often marketed under “El Alquimista”, Edwin’s personal brand for his microlots, which have featured in barista competitions and choosy roasters around the world. Edwin’s processing for this particular lot involves a two-step fermentation, followed by raised-bed drying. Fresh cherry is first soaked in water for 1 hour, and then fermented in the style of carbonic maceration, in which the fruit is sealed in a chamber with a one-way valve for oxygen to escape but not enter, creating an increasingly CO2-rich environment as the cherry ferments. After 48-hours in the sealed chamber, the cherry is depulped and fermented in a covered tank with the addition of the yellow “must”—the sugary, tangy juice produced during carbonic maceration—added as well. This second fermentation lasts 72 hours. Once complete the parchment is washed clean, leaving about 25% of the original mucilage intact and taken to raised beds to dry in the sun. Drying takes 15 days for this process. The fully dried coffee is conditioned for 8 days in a warehouse, allowing for humidity to stabilize inside the seeds, and then moved into GrainPro bags for long-term storage, where it is cupped numerous times over the next few weeks for quality analysis.