Farm Info

The Castillo-Caturra GT Culturing is produced at Finca Milan, located in the village of el Hogar in the municipality of Pereira in the department of Risaralda. Its owner is Julio Cesar Madrid who comes from a family where coffee-growing has been a tradition, him being the third generation of coffee makers. Finca Milan has been owned by the Madrid family for 40 years, during this time other nearby farms have been added to get to the 50 hectares that they have today.

The Milan farm was originally owned and managed by Mr. Rafael Madrid, who taught and transmitted his love and passion for growing coffee to his son Julio Cesar. Over the years, the farm made the transition from producing traditional coffees to specialty coffees where the contribution of Don Rafael’s experience and tradition, together with the innovation and new knowledge acquired by Julio, allowed the development of unique production and processing techniques that make the coffee from Finca Milan very special.
Today they have developed different fermentation techniques such as traditional Natural, Washed, Honey, and Culturing.

Culturing Fermentation Technique

Culturing is one of the fermentation methods used in the food industry (for example to make yogurt) in which so-called starter culture, rich in micro-organisms is used to transform another product.
Finca Milan relies on this technique to apply it in the fermentation of their coffees. They make starter cultures and process them with locally available fruits and aromatic plants, and then mix them with the coffee to generate a fermentation.
These starter cultures use yeasts and bacteria plus the microbial load that the fruit already contains (pineapple, mango, passion fruit, etc.)

On the other hand, the coffee also undergoes spontaneous fermentation where a special and unique bacterial load develops from the native and local environment, around the coffee plantations.
In this mix, there are also those native micro-organisms present in the post-harvest or coffee processing sites. After meeting certain temperature conditions and pH, among other indicators, the coffee is mixed with the fruit along with the starter culture, passing to a mixed fermentation process generating an ideal environment for the multiplication of the yeasts and bacteria in charge of fermenting (restricted oxygen, monitored temperatures and Ph).

GT refers to the type of stater culture that was used.