Colombia Antioquia Estate

Tasting Notes:
 
Toffee apple and lime with dark chocolate and caramel
 
Altitude - 1400 - 1800 masl
Preparation - washed
Location - Antioquia
SCAA Cup Score - 83.5
Variety - Colombia, Castillo
 
This coffee comes from the biggest farm in Colombia based around the beautiful area of Salgar in Antioquia. The Green Coffee Company was established in 2017 with the mission to change the dynamic of Colombian production using innovation, expertise and quality to bring consistent coffees to clients around the world.
 
The total farm size in now 4000Ha and this has been built up by acquiring 40 farms where they are able to implement full control over all aspects of production from the agronomy through to post harvest process and export. They have invested heavily in technology, and they have two centralised wet mills named Esmerelda and Gualanday which together have the capacity to deal with 360000kg of cherry per day.  These wet mills are some of the most advanced in Latin America with the use of cherry colour sorters and the use of electronic tracking throughout the process. This advanced wet mill system has helped them reduce the volume of water needed to produce coffee by over 21 million litres.
 
At GCC there is also a strong focus on the environment and social conditions that are part of the philosophy of the supply chain. On the farms they are working actively to protect the watershed by planting over 26,000 non coffee trees on the land. They actively manage 55% of this land as well as having 153 ha of designated reserved forest. They have also planted in this time over 2 million coffee trees of Castillo and Colombia on land that used to be used for cattle production. In the nursery as well they have completely eliminate the use of plastics used for seedlings by implementing the Ellepot system where a machine fills biodegradable, cellulose bags with a mix of peat perlite and coconut bark that is the ideal development environment for germinated seeds. This improves upon the manual method in several ways which also helps to improve the time to germination for seedlings as well as reducing the mortality from 23% to 15% so more make it to be planted in the field.
 
The farms have over 400 permanent employees who also have access to secured regular work as well as having a pension program for the workers. They also have an equal opportunity program with 27% of the employees being female and with the aim to create more leadership roles for women at the farms. They have also an initiative supporting single mothers into employment in the local community.
 
1. Cherry is received at wet mills. There are two kinds of cherry that the mills receive: cherry harvested from GCC farms OR cherry purchased from 3rd party partners that they work with and are processed and tracked separately.
 
2. Cherry is floated in small tanks to remove debris and floaters. This is the only step where water is used. 
 
3. Cherry is colour sorted. Using MultiScan technology, the machines can be calibrated to the tolerance for ripeness optically and sort the cherry at this stage. Next the coffee is moved mechanically where it is sorted by density and then size. 
 
4. Coffee is pulped in 6 different pulpers according to cherry size. This minimizes any damage in pulping, as only the correct size cherry is sent to pulpers calibrated for that size.  
 
5. Coffee is moved mechanically to fermentation tanks, where it is fermented with a proprietary enzyme developed by our fermentation scientist. This allows us to ferment coffee for 3-5 hours, before it is washed in an ecowasher (a little more water use here) and again moved mechanically to dryers. 
 
5. The coffee is dried for 12 hours at 50' celsius in silos to 45% moisture content, then transferred to gardiolas where it is finish-dried at 42' celsius for 16 hours to 11.5% humidity.
 
6. From here the parchment is bagged and moved to our drymill facilities where the lots are created and tagged.
 
7. The coffee is then milled and prepared for shipment