La Pavoni Professional

“Effectively all of these wild processes are scientifically "valid". They are what they say they are, and they do serve to process the coffee between harvest and drying. Not all of them necessarily are going to have wild outlier results or create really outlandish fruit flavours. However, many of the more unconventional processing methods are used and chosen because they can result in outlandish flavours - we know this because many of these methods are things we're borrowing from wine or beer industries, that have those similar effects when applied to alcohol-focused fermentations. The "validity" of the processes, from a science perspective, isn't really connected to the unusual tasting notes that can sometimes accompany them. >Can anyone with a scientific background comment on the validity of these processes? Or are they just adding essential oils / flavouring under the guise of advanced scientific fermentation. I don't think confining modelling to only these two options is necessarily setting a useful framing on your enquiry. It is *very* unlikely that a producer is adding essential oils or flavourings to processing - that's the sort of thing that is risking their professional reputation and their business' long term future for some very marginal short-term gains. Adding flavourings is clearly understood by all parties to be 'cheating' and would be treated as product adulteration if discovered. "Adulteration" is a very bad word and is a label that farms and processing houses are very eager to avoid - it can ruin the business' reputation long-term. If this coffee was coming from a "nobody" farm it might be a little more plausible they'd take that risk, but Finca El Paraiso is already so successful (*by coffee farm standards*) that they'd be incredibly short-sighted to risk their current position and their existing high prices, just to add a few more pennies per pound to this year's crop. At the same time, I don't think that it necessarily rules out co-fermentation. Co-fermentation is wildly, hotly, controversial within the Specialty community and especially in Specialty Industry circles. Most professionals see co-fermentation as adulteration - the processor is adding something that is not the original coffee cherries to the processing vat, in order to 'artificially' inflate the sale value of their coffee. Yet, there are also some farmers (with vested interests, to be clear) who make the case that co-fermentation is not adulteration or manipulation, so it's not as rigorously avoided and sometimes is even done but not disclosed. Because the proverbial waters have been muddied by the back and forth there, there is unfortunately a growing trend of co-fermentation being used but not being disclosed, as farmers don't have the same understanding that the method itself, or failing to disclose the method, are risking reputational harm.”