Colombia Camilo Merizalde Cherry Madness

Finca Santuario was founded by Camilo Merizalde, who started with a clear vision and desire to create a unique farm, capable of producing the best specialty coffees in Colombia. With quality coffee as the focus, he realised that the key was to create a biodynamic and diverse environment which will benefit the coffee as well as the volcanic soil and surrounding ecosystem in the long run. This is important for the varieties at Finca Santuario because they are high quality, typically low yielding and often vulnerable in comparison with other varieties grown in Colombia. The harmonious relationship that Finca Santuario facilitates between the plants and their surrounding environment allows for the creation of some of the most spectacular coffees available from Colombia. The Santuario Project was born as Camilo spread his vision to Costa Rica, Brazil and Mexico. In the past, Zest offered a Mexican Cherry Madness coffee from Santuario which quickly became a fan favorite.

For the Cherry Madness process, cherries are harvested between 24-25 brix’s level and soaked in water for 5 hours. This is followed by fermenting cherries in an anaerobic and Co2 rich environment for 48 hours with Mossto, recirculating the Mossto concentrate every 8 hours, this is the first of two cycles of Carbonic Maceration. The second CM process takes place with coffee cherries for an additional 30 hours, recirculating the Mossto concentrate every 10 hours. Coffee is then sun dried on African beds for 23-24 days until humidity is reduced to 10.5 %. Final humidity stabilization for 6 days inside a warehouse (Fique Bags), then coffee is finally stored in grain pro bags for the final stabilization of (8-10 days). Finally coffees are cupped and vacuum packed and prepared for export.

Mossto is a concentrate of crushed cherry pulp, a technique similar to wine makers. Adding this gives the microbes extra sugar to process.