Page 44 - #46 English

Culture

Article/Photos: by Mikhail Sebastian
Specialty Coffee Market of Puerto Rico.

Barista experience at coffee farm.

Hacienda Pomarrosa.

The true exploration of coffee starts at the farm. It is a long, arduous process that requires patience, from harvest-
ing to transportation, before it gets into the hands of roasters and speciality coffee shops across the globe. Spending time
working on a farm, doing everything from scratch, understanding what it takes to produce what we work with, allows a
sincere appreciation of your work, resulting in the most valuable beverage to us all, coffee. It is a volatile character that
requires a very delicate handling, otherwise it will not hesitate to surprise you. I spent some time trying to improve the
coffee at Hacienda Pomarrosa, Puerto Rico.

Hacienda Pomarrosa faces the cooling breeze
from the Caribbean Sea but lacks sunlight and the area is
mostly cloudy with constant rain. My experiments were
conducted in order to analyze the flavour profile of Puerto
Rican coffee at that particular farm based on environmental
factors. Puerto Rico belongs to the tropical climate group,
but Hacienda Pomarrosa is divided into a tropical and wet
climate type, resulting in cloudy weather at the farm almost
every day. Besides increasing certain flavour components of
Pomarrosa’s coffee, the objective of my stay was to highlight
sweetness and add acidity in certain degrees, taking into
account the wide range of fruit trees and the abundance of
pine trees that provide shadow for the coffee shrubs.
The experiments I initiated were not easy since none
had ever been done in Puerto Rico. Proper harvesting and
processing were overlooked which complicated my project
as the farmer did not welcome such an approach with ease.
I concentrated on red and ripe cherries, typica and caturra
varietal’s. Those varietal’s were spread around rather than
planted in one row, this made it difficult to focus on one in
particular.
Hacienda’s traditional processing method was to
wash them and after harvest, sorters remove debris and
then put the cherries in a mechanical de-pulper to remove
skin and some of the mucilage, soak them in water for 12
hours, and dry them in a mechanical dryer until the proper
moisture level is established. The problem with the mechani-
cal dryer was that it did not have a large enough capacity
to hold all the beans. This meant there was no other choice
but to let the beans soak in water for too long, leading to
inconsistency. Beans were not rotated during the drying
phase, which further complicated the issue because the
different groups would give different moisture levels. The
climatic condition in Hacienda’s storage warehouse was
also not ideal. It did in fact keep the coffee dry, but it did
not keep coffee cool and the coffee continued drying.
The first two months were difficult, the farmers
did not provide any help so I had to do everything alone;
picking, sorting, and processing. I tried to be more consis-
tent with my tasks, taking into consideration all factors so
as not to over-ferment the beans, soaking the cherries in
the water to remove ‘floaters’ (beans that are damaged or
under-developed), de-pulp cherries, soak beans covered
with mucilage to remove further green bean floaters, all
before starting the fermentation process with my experi-
mental ideas. My goal was to achieve quality that meets
the definition of speciality. My objective was to get 80lbs
44