Co-ferment
Fruit, pulp or a selected culture goes into the tank with the coffee. The added ingredient is doing real work in the cup.
- Family
- Co-ferment
- Processing character
- Transformative
A co-ferment adds something to the fermentation that didn't grow on the coffee tree. Usually that's fruit or fruit pulp, sometimes a specific yeast or bacterial culture selected to drive a particular ester.
Mechanically it's an anaerobic ferment with an ingredient list. Cherries go into a sealed tank with the addition, and the sugars and microbes from both sides interact over a long hold, often more than a hundred hours under controlled temperature.
This is the most interventionist end of processing and it should be labeled plainly. When a coffee tastes like peach, and peaches were in the tank, the honest thing is to say so.
Co-ferments sit at the top of our processing character scale, but not because something was added. They sit there because you taste it. The scale measures what reaches the cup, not what went into the tank.
The good ones are genuinely good and we sell them happily. They just aren't telling you about a place the way a washed lot does.
Mechanically it's an anaerobic ferment with an ingredient list. Cherries go into a sealed tank with the addition, and the sugars and microbes from both sides interact over a long hold, often more than a hundred hours under controlled temperature.
This is the most interventionist end of processing and it should be labeled plainly. When a coffee tastes like peach, and peaches were in the tank, the honest thing is to say so.
Co-ferments sit at the top of our processing character scale, but not because something was added. They sit there because you taste it. The scale measures what reaches the cup, not what went into the tank.
The good ones are genuinely good and we sell them happily. They just aren't telling you about a place the way a washed lot does.
This is the starting presumption for the processing character scale. An individual coffee can sit higher or lower when the cup says so.
