Ozone Coffee Brenda Palli, Anoxic Washed

The coffee for this lot came from a mix of Sol De La Mañana producers from the Uchamachi colonia. The largest contributor was Brenda Palli, a 29 year old producer who's been working in Sol De La Mañana since 2021. Her farm, La Hermosa, is located at 1,580 metres above sea level in the colony of Villa Rosario.

To ensure only the very ripest coffee cherries are picked, it's not uncommon for producers in the SDLM program to do 7 or 8 harvesting passes across their plants, many more than producers in other parts of the world do. This is very labour-intensive and yields smaller amounts each pass, but ensures great quality. The downside is that for each delivery of cherries from the SLDM producers in Bolinda, the lots are often too tiny to process separately and so instead, deliveries from all the producers are combined and processed together.

So how was this coffee processed, you ask? This is an experimental Anoxic Washed lot. Both Anaerobic and Anoxic are ways of saying "without oxygen". Depending on the context, the words can mean different things - sometimes when you see these terms they’re indicative of totally different processes, sometimes they simply refer to a different tweak of the method within the same system.

In this case, “Anaerobic” refers to the more traditional method of producing coffees, where oxygen is limited during fermentation. That entails creating a sealed environment (in a plastic bag or fermenting vessel) with coffee cherries in water and allowing the yeast and other microorganisms present to consume all available oxygen (which they will do first) before switching to Anaerobic Fermentation.

“Anoxic” is a new variation on this goal from the Los Rodriguez team and Adrian, who is in charge of the Buena Vista wet mill. It involves the same initial steps of placing the cherries into a fermenter, but then a low-pressure CO2 flush is applied to remove oxygen from the system. This creates an environment without free oxygen from the very beginning. Because there is no free Oxygen in the system to allow yeast or bacterial growth to begin naturally, a viable yeast population must be added to facilitate fermentation. In this case, the population is grown from a sample isolated from a coffee cherry from one of the Rodriguez farms.

Compared to Carbonic Maceration, the difference is that the CO2 is not under high pressure - it is simply being used to displace the free O2. This process is the end result of the La Linda "Experimental" Washed coffee that we bought last year - this year we see it produces very fruit forward coffees, which are nonetheless very clean. The profile that results from this type of processing is very different to a typical Washed coffee, a fascinating variation that tastes a lot closer to what you’d traditionally expect from a Natural.

• Country: Bolivia
• Department: La Paz
• Province: Caranavi
• Community: Villa Rosario
• Farm: La Hermosa
• Producer: Brenda Palli
• Location: 15°48'56.8"S 67°31'40.9"W
• Altitude: 1400 – 1650 m.a.s.l
• Processing method: Anoxic Washed
• Varietals: Caturra & Catuai