About This Coffee
The Caturra Nitro from Café UBA's Finca Milán in Pereira, Colombia is the kind of cup that makes you stop and think about what you're tasting. It's clean and precise, but it's also genuinely surprising with a sweet caramel structure up front, followed by a juicy watermelon brightness and a soft cantaloupe finish that lingers in a way you don't expect from coffee.
That character doesn't happen by accident. Café UBA developed their Nitro Washed process entirely in-house, and it's one of the more thoughtful approaches to fermentation we've come across. It starts before the cherry is even depulped where the freshly picked fruit is bagged and allowed to undergo an embryonic stress fermentation, accelerating metabolic activity before being cooled rapidly in a cold water tank. Pretty much what that means is they're waking the seed up at the moment of peak energy, then hitting pause to set the stage for everything that comes next. From there, the coffee is depulped, rested, and then transferred into a sealed bioreactor where oxygen is replaced with nitrogen and a carefully selected mix of starter cultures and fruit mossto is introduced. In this case, watermelon is introduced, allowing for controlled ester and alcohol development while suppressing sharp acidity and undesirable ferment flavors. Temperature, pH, and Brix levels are monitored throughout the entire 4 to 6 day fermentation window. The result is a cup with layered complexity and a vibrant, fruit-forward character that stays clean and expressive from first sip to last.
On our end, we approached the roast with a lot of restraint. A coffee this thoughtfully processed deserves to be treated as such. We kept development deliberately light, just enough to build the caramel sweetness and give the cup some structure, without pushing so far that we'd lose the melon brightness that makes this coffee worth talking about in the first place. The margin between a great roast and an over-roasted one on a coffee like this is narrow, and we spent a lot of time finding it.
This is a coffee for the curious. If you've ever wanted to taste what happens when a producer treats fermentation like a science and an art at the same time, and a roaster does their best to highlight those characteristics, this might just be what you're looking for.
