Doña Margarita, espresso from Nicaragua
Doña Margarita espresso from Nicaragua
Doña Margarita was a former owner of our Finca Santa Rita. Today we name our most complex coffees after her. This espresso is extremely aromatic and atypical for the Dipilto region. The reason: a long and controlled fermentation in cooled barrels and drying in the cherry give The coffee has tropical and chocolaty notes and a velvety texture.
Roasted for espresso and cappuccino, long coffee
Doña Margarita - green coffee information
Origin: Finca Santa Rita, Dipilto, Nicaragua
Producers: Kaffeemacher:innen Team Nicaragua around Claudia and Tim
Varieties: Caturra, Catuaí, Catimor
Post-harvest process: Fermentation of the cherries in the cold room, then dried as natural
This is how you would prepare the Doña Margarita
Here we show you in a short video how to set up such a recipe.
Tell me more about Doña Margarita
This espresso is a joint effort. It is a blend of different varieties from five different fincas around Santa Rita. We have wanted to make an intense natural espresso for a long time. However, we lacked sufficient raw materials: coffee cherries. On the one hand, we are in the middle of renovating Santa Rita, so we are first planting new trees, and on the other hand, we are aiming for larger quantities of espressos than filter coffee. Our neighboring farms el Arroyo, el Recuerdo, La Soledad and San José helped us out and contributed coffee cherries. All coffees grow between 1100 m above sea level (Santa Rita) and 1450 m above sea level (El Recuerdo).
Why does the coffee taste the way it tastes?
Tim Willems, who leads our local team, received the sorted cherries in Ocotal, transferred them into tight barrels and stored them in a cold room at a constant temperature for more than two weeks. This intensive, but extremely controlled, fermentation intensified the lush fruit notes. The cherries were then dried in thin layers on air-permeable beds. This slowed the fermentation so that the coffee could retain its clear notes. Tim calls this coffee “Lucid Dreams” - the coffee is a dream, but one that you should be aware of; this flavor profile is not a standard, but the laborious, detailed work of people who are always looking for new ways to make coffee even better.
How do we roast this coffee?
We roast the coffee as a 20kg batch on our 30kg Giesen roaster. With a total roasting time of 12:30 and a development time of 2 minutes, we bring the coffee quickly to the first crack and develop it a little longer than usual. This way we intensify the balance between sweetness and acidity. Since the beans come from different farms and we aim for a uniform roasting of all the beans, this roast is one of the few that we roast with increasing airflow. This way we distribute the hot air evenly and roast the beans more uniformly.
