NOMAD COFFEE, SPAIN

As much today as in 2011, when it was a simple coffee cart stationed at markets around the busy city of London, Nomad Coffee’s values and goals remain the same: proximity, respect for the producer and careful attention to detail throughout the production chain.

Nomad later moved to Barcelona to open its first shop and help cultivate a taste for speciality coffee in the Catalan capital. Soon after, they opened their own open roastery and, still guided by the premise of bringing coffee closer to the public, they began to distribute their product and create a collaborative network of cafés, helping the project to grow on an international scale.

Nomad’s trademark is its roasting, which is why they want to have a hand in every stage of the production process. They travel to origin looking for the best beans and work side by side with importers and farmers. They roast their coffee at their headquarters, applying their own quality standards, which help them develop each bean to its full potential.

A team of baristas is responsible for extracting the uniqueness and excellence from every coffee in each of Nomad’s shops.

Granja Paraíso 92 is a family-owned farm, managed by Wilton Benítez. Wilton is a chemical engineer passionate about technology, biotechnology and development of new systems that guarantee the quality of coffee. He started his career as researcher at the age of 20, shorty after graduating from high school and starting a degree in business management, electronic, technology and industrial mechanics. Wilton has been experimenting with coffee processing since 2008 but it was not until 2016 that he saw the first results. That’s a sign of the effort, time and I+D inversion that Wilton did in order to develop his processes. The drying machines from the farm operate with a low amount of electric energy, which reduces the emission of greenhouse gasses.

Granja Paraíso 92 has its own microbiology laboratory, quality laboratory and processing area. The processes used at the farm start with a strict selection and cherry sterilization before starting the first controlled anaerobic fermentation, where a specific microorganism is added. The coffee is then depulped and goes through a second fermentation. Beans are then sealed with a technique known as thermal shock (how water and cold water).

Process
All the processes performed at Granja Paraíso 92 start with a strict selection during the harvest and cherry sterilization to ensure best quality. The coffee mass is controlled until reaching a pH of 4. Cherries then go through a controlled fermentation under anaerobic conditions (without oxygen). After this initial fermentation, the skin is removed from the cherries before fermenting under anaerobic conditions again, this time with yeasts. The coffee then goes through a process known as thermal shock, which consists on washing the coffee with hot water and cooling it rapidly with cold water. The last step consists on a mechanical drying, using equipment instead of sun-drying the coffee, in order to have more control on the temperature and speed of the drying, to guarantee a higher consistency.