Bean Juice Club September 2026: Nicolle Ome, Castillo Natural
This month's Bean Juice Club is a first: the first lot this producer has ever released under her own name, from a farm her family has worked since 1984. Meet Nicolle's Castillo Natural from Huila, Colombia: a hundred-hour anaerobic natural with cocoa, blackberry, and orange, a creamy body, and a sweetness that doesn't quit.
Why the family let her do it
La Esmeralda is about 25 acres at 5,600 feet in Huila, with ten people working it. Forty-some years of the same family on the same hillside, and everyone with a job.
Nicolle is the newest of them, and she wanted to take part in the harvest, hoping to seal part of it in an airtight tank for four days before leaving it to dry in the sun with the fruit still on it for weeks. Done poorly, coffee will come out with a vinegar-like astringency and remnants of cheap booze. That, or the coffee will mold on the drying bed before it ever gets sorted.
Either way, the batch is worth a fraction of what it cost to grow. And it’s risky, so getting buy-in isn’t always easy. But for Nicolle, the family bought in and her success developed something incredible. Like them, I think the reason is that she's the one who can actually taste what she's proposing: she's taken formal coursework in tasting and evaluating coffee, and she handles the farm's marketing. So she wasn't guessing, and she could explain the plan to the people who'd be absorbing the risk.
What is an anaerobic natural?
Two separate things are happening here, and it's worth pulling them apart.
Natural is about drying. Coffee grows as a fruit, a small red cherry with the seed inside, and that seed is what we roast. Usually, the fruit gets stripped off within hours of picking. In a naturally processed coffee, it doesn't; the whole cherry goes out to dry intact and stays that way for weeks, so the seed sits inside its own fruit the entire time, and the fruit flavor works its way in. It's the oldest way to process coffee and is still the least forgiving, because a cherry that isn't perfectly ripe will rot instead of drying.
Anaerobic is about the fermentation that happens before any of that. The cherries go into sealed tanks with the oxygen pushed out. Without oxygen, a different set of microbes takes over, working more slowly and producing different flavors than they would in an open tank. Nicolle's batch sits in there for 100 hours, or a little over four days, to build sweetness.
Only ripe cherries get picked before going to a water tank for a second check. A properly ripe cherry is dense enough to sink, while the underripe and damaged ones float, so they can be easily skimmed off and tossed.
What's left goes into the sealed tanks for a hundred hours. Then it comes out onto raised beds in the sun and dries whole for weeks.
All this to say… naturals are risky and anaerobic fermentation is riskier.
How I'd brew it
If you're making this at home, try a cone dripper and a paper filter to really pull the three distinct “experiences” youll have: the cocoa, the blackberry, and the orange, a paper filter keeping them each distinct. Water passes through the grounds once and leaves, and the paper catches the oils that would otherwise blur everything together.
And if you'd we make it for you: it's on pour over bar and available as single origin espresso. Happy to make a recommendation in the shop on tasting it.
What makes this one taste like cocoa and blackberry?
Tasting notes: Blueberry Pie 🫐, Red Table Wine 🍷, Tang 🍊, Sweet & Fruity Finish 🍋
The variety. Castillo was developed by Colombia's national coffee research institute and released in the mid-2000s, mainly because it resists leaf rust (a fungus that can wipe out a farm's entire harvest), and did exactly that across much of Latin America a decade ago. So Castillo got planted everywhere and it earned a reputation as the sensible choice.
The fermentation. Its long, slow, oxygen-free stretch is why the fruit here lands as blackberry and orange rather than just generically fruit-forward.
The drying. Weeks of the seed sitting in its own fruit is where the darker end comes from, like the cocoa and the sweetness sitting underneath everything else.
For what it's worth for my fellow coffee nerds: coffee gets graded on a 100 point scale, and 80 is the line where it starts being called specialty. With this one coming in at 84.8, it’s a really strong number for a natural (and a surprising one for a Castillo).
Grab a bag before it sells out. This one’s special and won’t be around for long!
