Finca San Martin, the New Colombian Double Fermentation

There’s a certain kind of coffee you remember long after the bag is empty.

You make a cup thinking it’ll just be part of your morning, then halfway through you stop for a second because something changes. First dark cherry. Then raspberry jam. Then a little tropical fruit starts showing up. As the coffee cools, dark chocolate settles underneath everything and the whole cup becomes deeper and sweeter. That’s what coffees like this from Finca San Martin do so well. They keep unfolding while you drink them.

When the first sip hits..

This lot comes from Colombia, grown at 2050 metres above sea level, where colder temperatures slow the ripening process down. Coffee cherries develop more slowly at higher elevations, which usually creates denser beans with more sweetness and clarity in the cup. It’s part of why so many memorable Colombian coffees come from mountain regions where harvesting takes patience.

The Variety

The variety here is Bourbon. One of the oldest coffee varieties still widely respected in specialty coffee today. Bourbon is known for its sweetness, balanced acidity, and smooth texture. Even before any experimental processing enters the picture, it already tends to produce coffees with a polished and fruit driven profile.

But this coffee goes further than a traditional washed Bourbon.

Why so Special?

Finca San Martin uses a double fermentation process, something that has become increasingly common among producers in regions like Huila and Cauca. Those regions have become known for producers experimenting with fermentation in ways that completely changed what people expect Colombian coffee to taste like.

Double fermentation can involve several stages of controlled fermentation, often inside sealed tanks where oxygen exposure is limited. Some producers work with specific yeast cultures while others adjust temperatures during washing and drying to influence flavour development. Every producer has their own approach, which is why coffees like this can taste completely different from one harvest to the next.

The result is usually a coffee with bigger fruit character, heavier aromatics, and more layers in the cup.

For a long time, specialty coffee focused heavily on very clean and classic profiles. Floral Ethiopians. Crisp washed Central Americans. Coffees that felt delicate and structured. Then producers in Colombia started experimenting more aggressively with fermentation and suddenly entirely different flavour profiles started appearing in cafés and roastery's.

Strawberries. Sangria. Tropical fruit. Dark chocolate. Red berries.

Some people loved it immediately. Others thought coffee had gone too far.

Finca San Martin finds a really good balance between those two worlds. The fermentation brings out all those fruit notes and syrupy textures, but underneath it you still get the sweetness and structure that make Colombian Bourbon coffees so enjoyable in the first place.

You can still taste the origin in the cup.

Make Seasons Feel Exciting Again

That’s part of what makes coffees like this so interesting right now. Farms are no longer only focused on cultivation and export. Processing has become creative in a way coffee rarely used to be. Producers are experimenting constantly, trying different fermentation lengths, yeast strains, honey processing methods, and drying techniques to see how much flavour they can pull from the same coffee cherry.

That’s part of the fun.

Coffee starts feeling seasonal again. Different every harvest instead of endlessly repeated. There’s something nice about not knowing if the next crop will taste exactly the same, because for the longest time, that’s what coffee was. You waited for certain arrivals. Certain harvests. People actually looked forward to coffees coming back around.

Then giant chains flattened everything into permanent menus and year round sameness. The surprise disappeared. So did some of the excitement.

Coffees like this bring a bit of that feeling back.

Slow Down Your Roll

This is one of those coffees that turns a regular morning into sitting at the kitchen table ten minutes longer than you planned. Calgary Spring rain outside, windows fogged up a little, grinder going before the rest of the house wakes up.

That kind of coffee.

We roast this lot in small batches right here at the Roasterie because coffees like this deserve attention from start to finish. 

Dark roasted beans from colombia, region popayan.

theroasterie.com

Dark Colombia

$22.00 CAD
$22.00 CAD
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