Colombia Santa Monica "Strawberry Parfait" Yeast Honey

Tasting Note:  Rose | Tangerine | Ripe Strawberry | Caramel Cookies

 Size:  200g/1kg

Brewing Recommendation: Filter Brews / Modern Espresso 

Ripe strawberry is the whole point of this cup and it was engineered rather than lucked into: a Castillo from Finca Santa Mónica in Quindío, Colombia, processed as a honey with wine yeast and strawberry added to the fermentation, so tangerine on the nose opens into ripe strawberry and settles into caramel cookies.

The family behind it

Finca Santa Mónica belongs to Jairo Arcila, a third-generation Quindío grower, with Luz Helena Salazar as the farm's administrator. It's his largest property at roughly 50 hectares, sitting on volcanic soil along the Buenavista road outside Armenia, with papaya, banana and plantain growing alongside the coffee. The experimental lots are processed and exported by Cofinet, the company his sons Carlos and Felipe founded, which lists a whole run of Santa Mónica "Honey (Wine Yeast / fruit)" lots: strawberry, green apple, banana, passionfruit, lychee. That's not a one-off gimmick. It's a programme, with the family's own export arm as the feedback loop.

How it's processed

Honey means the skin comes off in a depulper but the sticky mucilage stays on the parchment through drying, so those sugars keep working on the bean instead of being rinsed away. On top of that, ripe cherry goes into a dry anaerobic fermentation with the pulp still on, and a selected wine yeast and strawberry are added during it; the cherry is then pulped and dried on raised beds with ripe strawberries laid amongst the coffee. The yeast part means a known organism runs the ferment rather than whatever happens to be floating around the farm, steering pace and aroma without adding any sugar. The strawberry is the co-ferment part, bringing a whole new sugar source into the tank.

Trivia on Co-ferment

Here's the bit we'd rather tell you than not: research suggests only about 3% of the fruit used in a co-fermentation ever reaches the cup, while selected wine yeast on its own reliably produces fruity, floral character. So the strawberry you're tasting is mostly a fermentation result the Arcilas designed, not a flavour the berries handed over. Which, if anything, is more impressive.

Order a bag online, brew it gently, and give it two or three goes to dial that strawberry right in.