StrawBasil Shrub - Diego Bermudez - Colombia

Diego Bermudez is a physicist, engineer, and coffee producer with farms in the Cauca region of Colombia. For the DFW locals, you can visit his roastery and coffee showroom in Dallas, called Native. Diego puts his scientific background to work in creating some of the most complex coffees in the world, not sacrificing approachability in his highly controlled experimentation.

This coffee was rested with cardamom for 72 hours in biofermenters. The process is not immediately evident in tasting, though the cardamom adds an herbaceous quality, doing for coffee what bitters do for a well crafted cocktail.

We love Colombian coffees for their professional polish and particularly clean, distinct flavor notes. They are the perfect base for a relatively new fermenting trend where coffees are sealed and rested, sometimes with fruits, spices, yeasts, or other flavor boosting ingredients. This creates extraordinary cups of coffee without the use of additive chemicals or flavors in the roasting process. This fermentation causes natural chemical reactions in the coffee seeds for deeper, sweeter, more tropical flavors to emerge.

But there are risks in this process. Without the right care and attention in the fermenting process, coffee can take on notes of vinegar or spoilage. Further care must be taken in roasting since the cellular structure is less dense. The roasting profiles resemble our approach to decaf coffee for similar reasons.