Visiting Finca El Paraíso
Diego Bermúdez's fermentation lab in Huila is the kind of place that rewrites your understanding of what coffee can be.
The road into Cali is a ninety-minute negotiation between fog, trucks, and the side of the mountain. Once you're on it, Diego's farm appears not gradually but all at once: you come around a bend and the entire valley opens below you, and the tanks are right there.
He built the lab himself. Four sealed stainless-steel fermentation tanks, each with its own pressure valve, temperature sensor, and pH probe. A wall of notebooks going back to 2009. A coffee farmer with the instruments of a wine chemist.
We cupped nine lots in the shed. The one we bought is the one that tasted like fig and cherry and chocolate in a way nothing washed-process could.
Diego doesn't like to be called an artisan. "I'm a technician," he kept saying in Spanish. "This is a technique."