Finca Milan Tangerine

This lot comes from Café Uba, a coffee project built around two producers, Julio César Madrid Tisnés and Julio Andrés Quiceno, who work across four farms in the coffee growing hills of Risaralda and Caldas. Their work covers growing, processing, and roasting, and they treat fermentation as a craft worth developing in house rather than sending out. That hands on approach is what makes a coffee like this Tangerine lot possible.

The coffee grows at Finca Milán, in the village of Betulia, Arabia township, outside Pereira. The farm has grown coffee since 1982, and its processing center sits inside a building that dates back to the 1950s. Instead of tearing it down, the team built a new specialty focused facility around the original walls and beams, with room to process 20,000 kilos of cherry a day. Finca Milán protects three natural water springs and keeps corridors of native guadua bamboo running through the property, alongside varieties like Castillo Naranjal, Caturra, Colombia, Supremo, Pink Bourbon, and Catiope.

Finca Milán sits in Risaralda, part of the coffee growing heart of Colombia that also takes in Dosquebradas, Santa Rosa de Cabal, and Manizales. Café Uba runs its full operation across this area, from four farms through a dry mill, a processing station, a roasting center, and a cupping and barista lab, with quality as the throughline connecting each step from seed to cup.

This lot uses Café Uba's culturing fermentation method, built around a fruit forward take on co-ferment. The coffee ferments together with a must of orange and pineapple, under restricted oxygen, for more than 144 hours. That mixed fermentation brings in fruit, aromatic plants, and a chosen mix of yeasts and bacteria, all working through the coffee together. The result is a sweet, fruity cup with tangerine, cinnamon, and orange blossom coming through, along with a soft tropical character that runs through the whole profile. After fermentation, the coffee dries on raised beds for 25 days, then finishes with five days of mechanical drying.

Café Uba backs this work with outside research. Along with Cenicafé and Universidad de los Andes, the team published a study on the fermentation methods developed at Finca Milán, looking at how starter cultures change the microbial community during fermentation and the cup that results.