Finca Tamana Castillo Espresso

Finca Tamana Castillo Espresso

A sweet coffee with herbal and dark chocolate notes and a lingering sweet finish.

250g whole coffee beans

View full details

About this coffee

Cultivar: Castillo Tambo

Flavour notes: Herbal, red fruits & dark chocolate

Producer: Elias Roa & Bellanid Sanchez
Country: Colombia
Region: El Pital, Huila
Process: Washed
Harvest date: June – July 2025

More about the cultivar

Castillo is the advanced variedad Colombia hybrid developed by the Colombian research organisation Cenicafe. The researchers spent over 30 years breeding this cultivar that is resistent to leaf rust and has potential to produce a very good cup quality. The parent plants are Timor Hybrid (a natural Robusta and Arabica crossing) and Caturra.

A few years after it’s launch in 2005, Colombian coffee farmers experienced a huge outbreak of leaf rust attacking the traditional cultivas like Caturra and Bourbon. Most farmers recovered in record time as the Colombian coffee growers federation helped supporting them with new Castillo seedlings to replace the traditional susceptible cultivars. It means that over 60% of the coffee grown in Colombia today are Castillo cultivars.

How the coffee was produced

Picking and sorting

  • The coffee is selectively hand picked by hired pickers under supervision of Elias. Cherries are hand-sorted before they are processed to make sure only ripe cherries are processed together.

Depupling, fermenting & washing

  • The coffee cherries are stored in the cherry hopper in open air over night before the coffee is de-pulped in the morning. After de-pulping, the parchment coffee with the mucilage on is fermented for 24 hours in clean stainless steel tanks. The fermentation is stopped when the mucilage is easy to clean off and before the coffee flavour is influenced by negative fermentation flavours. The coffee is then washed in clean water by using an eco-mill which is a mechanical mucilage remover. The eco-mill reduces water waste from the average 50-100 litres of water per kilo of coffee with traditional washing methods to only 0,5 – 1 litre per kilo. After washing the coffees are soaked for 24 hours in clean water in tiled cement tanks. All floaters (beans with low density) are removed during the washing and soaking process.

Drying

  • After the soaking stage the clean parchment coffee is dried in parabolic dryers and drying beds covered with shade nets to prevent the beans from over heating. The coffees are raked throughout the day to ensure even drying. Drying normally takes from 20 to 30 days and once the moisture content is below 11% it gets packed and stored in air tight grain pro bags. All our coffees from Finca Tamana are vacuum packed before it is shipped to Norway.

Shipping

For our Norwegian customers, we offer two shipping options:

  1. Pakke i Postkassen - With Pakke i Postkassen, tracking is provided, and delivery is estimated within 2-3 business days.
  2. Pakke til hentested - The parcel can be collected from a Post in Store, Post Office, parcel locker, or parcel box. This option includes tracking, with delivery expected within 1-5 business days.

For all international orders, we ship via DHL - Worldwide Express. This shipping method includes tracking, and all customs duties and taxes are covered in the shipping price, ensuring there are no unexpected charges for your order or its importation into the final destination. The estimated delivery time with DHL is 1-5 business days. For more information about shipping, please visit our FAQ page here. If you have further questions, please contact us here.

How to brew

Espresso


We strongly recommend using VST filter baskets. Both the 18g, 20g and the 22g basket is great for our coffee. The VST filters makes it a lot easier to extract the espresso properly which gives a lot more sweetness in the cup. They are also more or less identical to each other which makes it easy to be more consistent when brewing on several groups at the same time. You can buy the filters on our webshop, just make sure they fit your machine (ours fits all La Marzocco machines and machines with 58mm filter baskets). With the VST 18g filter basket, we recommend the following brewing parameters: 18-19g freshly-ground coffee, 25-35s brewing time, 35-38g of final brew liquid in the cup, 93°C-94°C brew water temperature.

Tim's notes

There has been a lot of scepticism among the quality driven coffee professionals and a fear that the tasty Caturra will be replaced by an inferior hybrid like Castillo. In general the modern hybrids can have a slight more herbal aftertaste, but I have found that when the cherries are picked at a deep purple colour, the herbal flavours are muted and you get more sweetness and fruity flavours in the cup. I personally believe it all boils down to how you harvest, process and roast the coffee and of course how healthy the coffee trees were during production. Having said that, Castillo do offer a slightly different cup profile than Caturra but as it iss less affected by rust, the quality is more consistent from year to year.

This particular Castillo comes from the regional selection named Tambo. There are several different types of Castillo and this is one of three types being produced at Tamana. I have been fortunate to be able to taste many of the different Castillo selections over the years and in my opinion the one that has been consistently tasting better than the rest is the Castillo Tambo. It can sometimes have a delicate floral flavour in addition to the well known sweet, chocolate, caramel, herbal and fruity flavours you typically find in these hybrid coffees.

Colombia

Finca Tamana

Finca Tamana is a 57 hectare coffee plantation located in the mountains between El Pital and La Plata in Huila Colombia. It was acquired by Elias Roa in 2011 after being abandoned for a while and today the farm is managed by Elias and his family.

Read more about the farm

Tim’s Choice – Coffee Subscription

With this coffee subscription, every month Tim will pick out his favourite coffees from our roastery in order to make sure that you receive something new and exciting every time. Freshly roasted coffee is sent out the first Wednesday of the month to all subscribers around the world.

Learn More