Aquiares has a unique characteristic; during harvest sporadic flowering events can occur, due to the Caribbean influenced rains. Their team has detected an opportunity in this phenomenon as they were evaluating which microbial cultures to use when fermenting their coffee cherries. There are very unique flower-inhabiting yeasts that feed on the nectar of coffee flowers during the first day of blooming. So they went out, very early in the morning, harvesting freshly opened flowers completely colonized with these particular types of yeast.<\/p>\n
They applied a technique of isolation to harvest wild yeasts from the collected flowers. That way they created a microbial culture from these yeasts. Upon identification of this culture, they found that a native strain of Metschnikowia pulcherrima was very abundant, as well as smaller colonies of Hanseniaspora species. The microbial culture was left to grow and develop in an agar. <\/p>\n
They then used this culture to inoculate their fermentation tanks at 5% with de-pulped coffee and water. Fermentation went on for 3 days until pH dropped and available sugars were consumed. Beans were then sun-dried slowly until the resulting rose-golden parchment showed and humidity dropped to 10.5%<\/p>\n