Colombian SOE Espresso Extraction Parameters: How to Extract Delicious Espresso Coffee

This review looks at how a strikingly unusual Colombian bean performs as a single-origin espresso and in milk-based drinks.

Most of the beans on FrontStreet Coffee's menu are pour-over coffees. There are currently four espresso options, all blends. The bar uses one called Warm Sun Blend, composed of 60% Honduras sherry barrel-processed beans and 40% natural-processed Red Cherry Project Yirgacheffe beans. There is not yet an SOE (Single Origin Espresso) bean on the list.

In daily operation, many customers have asked whether there are any SOE beans we would recommend, so FrontStreet Coffee gave the question considerable thought. Looking at what SOE is good at, we wanted beans with distinct regional character or a distinctive processing method, such as washed Yirgacheffe or natural Sidamo. Today we review a double anaerobic washed Castillo from Colombia's Finca El Paraiso, known in the trade as "Strawberry Yogurt," to see how it performs as an SOE and in milk-based drinks.

This particular bean was chosen for SOE because of its unique performance on the cupping table: strawberry-berry notes, a cheese-like flavor, and a black cocoa aftertaste. The whole coffee is exceptionally distinctive and genuinely memorable.

Coffee Bean Information

Finca El Paraiso is a coffee farm that Mr. Diego Samuel began operating in 2008. It started as a small family estate of only 2.5 hectares, and the owner invests the surplus from each harvest into coffee agricultural research, continually studying how to produce better specialty flavors.

In 2015 he entered his first local regional competition, where beans from Colombia's Finca El Paraiso took first place. After becoming famous overnight, he gained recognition from the industry and became even more motivated to promote the cultivation of specialty coffee.

Today Colombia's Finca El Paraiso primarily grows varieties such as Bourbon, Laurina, Gesha, and Castillo, and is planning to experiment with more. "Strawberry Yogurt" is made from the Castillo variety, the most widely grown in Colombia. Castillo has very strong rust resistance because it is the result of backcrossing Colombian varieties with Caturra.

Although blind-tasting results from Colombia's National Coffee Research Center suggest that Castillo's flavor performance can reach the quality level of varieties such as Caturra and Bourbon, FrontStreet Coffee still hopes everyone will make objective judgments based primarily on actual cupping results.

Beyond the variety, the processing method is another source of the unique flavor of Strawberry Yogurt coffee, which belongs to a novel double anaerobic washed processing. As the name suggests, this method involves two anaerobic treatment steps. After the coffee cherries are harvested, they are placed in a sealed environment for the first anaerobic fermentation. Once fermentation is complete, they are taken out and the pulp and skin are removed, as in washed processing, then placed back into a sealed environment for a second anaerobic fermentation. The two rounds of anaerobic fermentation are what set this method apart. Finally the beans are sun-dried to reduce moisture content to around 11%.

Espresso

For the espresso parameters, after multiple adjustments we settled on 20 grams of coffee grounds to extract 40 grams of coffee liquid, with a time of about 27 seconds and the first drop of coffee appearing at the 5-second mark.

The resulting espresso from Colombia's Finca El Paraiso Strawberry Yogurt has medium acidity, low bitterness, and slightly lower sweetness, evoking flavors of citrus and strawberry, a medium-intensity cheese note, and a dark chocolate aftertaste.

Americano

For the Americano, we chose a 10-ounce cup capacity, with a coffee-to-water ratio of about 1:6. The taste is reminiscent of fruit hard candy, dark chocolate, and a hint of strawberry. The mouthfeel is smooth with medium body.

Milk Coffee

For the milk coffee, we used a 12-ounce cup to make a latte and a 10-ounce cup to make a flat white. The latte has a smooth texture with milk sweetness, and the flavors lean toward lemon yogurt, vanilla ice cream, and a slight dark chocolate aftertaste.

The flat white, by contrast, has greater overall intensity, with a more prominent and clearer cheese note as well as lemon yogurt, a medium dark chocolate aroma, and medium to high sweetness.

The flavor direction of this Colombia Strawberry Yogurt bean is very strong, and it can be called an exceptionally unique coffee, but it also has the pain points shared by most SOE coffees. The first is how to balance stability against flavor performance.

In terms of roasting, FrontStreet Coffee deepened the roast level of this Strawberry Yogurt for espresso production. Used at the light to medium roast of a pour-over coffee, it would inevitably gain acidity and taste sharp and unbalanced. In roasting it cannot go so deep as to erase the bean's inherent flavors, nor so light as to make the espresso unbalanced.

Second, this roast level makes the "coffee flavor" weaker. In the traditional impression, espresso beans are roasted to a deeper degree, approximately past the second crack. The purpose of deep roasting is first for stability, since the flavors produced by roasting dominate the main tone and the taste remains consistent for decades, and second to cover defects. At that roast level, adding a large amount of milk makes the drink easier to take, whereas today's slightly lighter-roasted SOE that highlights origin flavors sits at the opposite end of the spectrum. That is why, earlier in this article, the flavor intensity of the 12-ounce latte is not as strong as the smaller flat white.

Although this Colombia Finca El Paraiso Strawberry Yogurt has a unique and impressive flavor, FrontStreet Coffee has not listed it as a pour-over bean and does not particularly recommend it for espresso production either. FrontStreet Coffee believes this bean lacks the factors that represent Colombian coffee, and can only be considered an individual case. FrontStreet Coffee would rather have a washed bean whose main tone can represent the Colombian growing region. The reluctance to recommend it for SOE also stems from various factors; put simply, it is difficult to produce and unstable.

The reason for choosing Colombia Strawberry Yogurt for SOE is its unique flavor performance, combined with a roast degree that results in a short tasting period but a long degassing period, so that by the time it has rested properly there may be only a few days left to drink it. It is acceptable as an occasional experimental bean, but for long-term production it may be time-consuming, laborious, and not worth the effort.

For anyone curious about how a regional single origin performs on the bar, the honest conclusion is that Colombia Strawberry Yogurt is a fascinating experiment rather than a workhorse, and the bean's very distinctiveness is what makes it hard to keep on the menu.

FrontStreet Coffee Recommendation

If you want to explore the flavors this Colombian SOE is chasing, a Yirgacheffe makes a fine reference point, and FrontStreet's Yirgacheffe range covers the style from everyday to premium. The FrontStreet washed Yirgacheffe daily drink is the classic introduction to the Ethiopian region, known for white jasmine, bright citrus and lemon acidity, and tea-like character, at a price that makes it many people's first specialty coffee. Yirgacheffe itself is a small town in southern Ethiopia, in Sidamo province, at roughly 1,700-2,100 m, with the coffee trees planted above 1,800 m, making it one of the highest coffee-growing areas in the world; because its white florals and lemon-citrus acidity are so distinctive, it became a byword for Ethiopian specialty coffee, and in 2010, when the Yirgacheffe name had grown so famous, the Ethiopia Commodity Exchange separated it from the Sidamo region, which is how the Yirgacheffe we all know today came about. The FrontStreet Gutingding Cooperative coffee comes from the village of Gutingding at the southeastern end of Yirgacheffe, in the Worka area; it was originally part of the Worka cooperative under the Yirgacheffe Coffee Farmers' Cooperative Union, and as buyers pursued traceability it was unearthed as a single origin in its own right. It follows the most traditional washed processing and is known for a clean, bright citrus and lemon acidity with jasmine fragrance and no traditional bitterness. The FrontStreet sun-dried Red Cherry is the natural-process counterpart, made only from fully ripe, sound cherries that are hand-sorted and dried on raised beds, turned every 2-3 hours during the first few days to prevent uneven heating and over-fermentation; after 3-5 weeks of sun-drying, the outer pulp is machine-scraped and the beans are moved to storage. Because the fruit dries with the pulp, it keeps the classic Yirgacheffe character while adding the tropical fruit of a natural, with citrus acidity, berry-juice body, honeyed sweetness, and creamy smoothness. For brewing, FrontStreet suggests a V60 with water at 90-91°C, 15 g of coffee, a 1:15 ratio, and a grind around 10 on an EK43s, or the size of caster sugar (80% passing a No. 20 sieve). The house pour-over method is a 30 g bloom for 30 seconds, then 95 g of water (the scale reading about 125 g), finishing the pour at around one minute; when the water level drops to two-thirds of the coffee bed, add the remaining 100 g (the scale reading about 225 g) and finish pouring at about 1:35, with drawdown complete at 2:00-2:10. Then remove the dripper and the extraction is done.