Castillo Coffee

One of the most important and sensitive steps to produce specialty coffees is the process. Our aim is to have a mass with a minimum average of 24-30 brix degrees in order to have enough sugars to develop the fermentation really well. It starts by selecting and carefully handpicking in the field. Once the pickers arrive at their site with the ripest cherries from the lot, the floating process starts. In this step, the cherries are placed in a tank with water to take out the non-dense coffee cherries and coffee tree leaves that start floating.

After floating, the process continues by hand sorting the beans on raised beds before the fermentation process. In hand sorting, the unripe/partial unripe cherries and the overripe cherries are separated.

Once the perfect cherries are obtained, the intact coffee cherries are placed in tanks for the Aerobic fermentation process, with a minimum amount of cold fresh water to control the temperature (18-22°C) for 24 hours. Afterwards, the coffee is then de-pulped and undergoes another 66 hours of Aerobic fermentation process with a low amount of cold freshwater (18-22°C).

With the Castillo Washed process, La Julia put the fermented coffee to drain on raised beds for 1 day, then on the mechanical drier for 56hours at 32-34°C (the drier is turned on about 12hours per day). The drying time takes around 6 days.
Once the coffee is dried, it goes into GrainPro bags for 30-60 days for stabilization purposes. Afterwards, the next step is milling and electronic sorting.