SENS Coffee was started by Juan Puerta a few years ago to change the landscape of coffee flavors. Juan is a food engineer who has worked in the coffee industry with a focus on tasting and quality assessment so you know he has a serious pallet. He got interested in cofermented coffees very early and got obsessed and passionate about them . But he quickly disliked the overpowering and sometimes artificial flavors , he also disliked some of the imbalances in those coffees. As a professional he wanted to try to develop good coffees not just fun coffees. So he came up with his own way of making coferments that he labeled osmotic dehydration.
After depulping the coffee, he let’s the coffee ferment in a tank for 12 hours. The coffee will naturally produce mosto (aka lixiviado) which comes mostly from the sugar and water of the mucilage. He then makes a mixture of the fresh fruit that he wants to coferment with glucose powder. He let’s the liquid with the coffee in its mucilage for 24 to 72 hours in sealed tanks. After the fermentation he leaves the coffee to dry with the liquid (a mix of mosto from the coffee’s mucilage and the “coferment juice”). Hence all of his coffees are honey coffees. But since they dry with the cofermented juice and not just the mucilage, we prefer calling it osmotic dehydration honey.
The great thing about Juan is that he is extremely open minded and wants to try more things. When I talked to him I asked about some fruits that I wanted to experiment with. He shared some of his experience . For example I asked him if we could try banana, but he told me that banana oxidize too fast and so far he didn't get good results. I would like to see what would happen if we mixed with a local fruit called Pitaya. Our experience with his coffee was very surprising, we initially didn’t want any coferments but were very surprised by the quality of the Rose Petal. However my personal opinion was that some of his other coffees tasted still too obviously like coferments, some of the flavors were too strong. And the reason why he does it is because the market likes some of these flavors.
Fun fact, we blindly ordered the Maracuya coffee before tasting it because our friend who recommended us to Juan said the rose and the maracuya are his favorite.
Send us or Juan a message if you have questions , I think he speaks English but I’m not sure definitely not Thai 😛 https://www.instagram.com/sens_coffee_ or us https://www.instagram.com/cota.cafe .
