This winter, we launched three unique micro lots from Colombia at the same time. All of them are grown by dedicated coffee farmers with a passion for the raw material and a belief in precision from bean to cup. You'll notice it in the taste.
Colombia is one of the largest coffee producers in the world. The spectacular Andes Mountains that stretch through the country offer ideal growing conditions and coffee has been grown here since the early 1800s.
The mountain slopes provide humidity and cool temperatures, and the variation in microclimates links distinctive flavors to different coffee regions. High above sea level in hilly terrain, coffee is usually grown on small, family-run farms with their own micro-mills and drying facilities.
The farmers you are about to meet look after and quality assure the raw material all the way from flowering to dried green coffee with a love for the product that results in unique coffee batches. We are proud to share these with you.
The natural talent who believes in his method
Finca Villa Marina is located near the town of San Antonio in the famous Tolima coffee region in central Colombia. Surrounded by deep valleys and soaring mountains, the coffee plants thrive in the fertile soil. This is also the case at Carmen Aragón, who has recently started producing coffee.
Carmen is seventy years old and runs Villa Marina alone. She has done so for eighteen years, but it was only two years ago that she started growing coffee. She took a course in coffee cultivation, built her own drying house and quickly proved to be a natural talent, producing coffee of very high quality.
She has planted all the coffee trees on the farm with her son. The bean types are castillo and caturra, local beans that contribute to the classic Colombian flavor profile of sweetness, body and a fruity, balanced acidity.
Carmen's coffee is rich in flavor with a good mouthfeel. It has notes of sweet cherry, typical of coffee from Colombia, but also hints of blackcurrant and a touch of cocoa in the aftertaste.
Carmen herself believes that the secret of her good results is that she is meticulous with her wet processing and washes all her coffee three times. When she started with coffee, the other farmers around her thought it was a bit strange that she washed her coffee so many times. However, she liked washing the coffee that way and thought it was good. Now she is the one in her farm group who gets the best feedback on the coffee she sells.
The accurate and conscious coffee farmer
Elsewhere in Tolima, at an altitude of over two thousand meters, coffee farmer Jesus Antonio Saavedra runs the El Placer farm. The nearest town is San Francisco, not far from the capital of the region, the city of Ibagué. The journey to the farm is long and steep and takes place on thin roads suitable only for feet or hooves.
Finca El Placer was established in 1997. Jesus Antonio first had a farm at an altitude of fifteen hundred meters, but when the climate changed, he bought the new farm, 2115 meters above sea level. Here, the coffee plants are in the sun all day, but the high altitude provides a cool enough temperature for the coffee berries to ripen slowly. The slow ripening leads to extra deep flavors in the berries.
Like Carmen, Jesus Antonio cultivates the castillo and caturra bean types. He believes that discipline and love for the coffee and the work leads to high quality results. He is very precise in his craft, growing and refining coffee with juicy flavors and floral notes. The new micro batch does not disappoint, offering complexity and fresh hints of forest berry, raspberry and plum.
It's not just coffee that Jesus Antonio takes seriously. He is very involved in the small local community and has donated part of the property where he has set up a school for the children in the area around the farm. There are just under ten children and a teacher lives on the farm from Monday to Friday. Jesus Antonio himself lives on the farm with his own family and has also hired several pickers from the local community. They might not otherwise have found work, but are now highly skilled pickers at Finca El Placer.
Attention to detail and refinement with precision
Finally, we head to the La Esperanza coffee farm, which scrapes the clouds on Tarqui's lush mountainsides. Tarqui is located in the heart of another of Colombia's renowned coffee growing areas, Huila. Here, for over twenty years, Yeni Ramos has been growing and processing coffee with the precision needed to bring out the area's pure and distinctive flavor.
La Esperanza means "hope" in Spanish and was bought by Yeni's father over forty years ago. Yeni inherited the farm twenty years ago and has since run it with her husband Fernez. They live on the farm with their four children and Fernez has six brothers who run farms in the surrounding area. The coffee farm is located at 1870 meters above sea level and also grows the bean types caturra and castillo, the highest at 1970 meters.
The couple have an eye for detail and each have their own role in the coffee processing. She wet-processes the coffee on her own micro mill and washes the coffee very carefully, up to five times. He takes care of the drying, pre-drying all the coffee before moving it to a separate drying house of an unusually high standard. Together, they produce exceptionally pure coffee of very high quality.
Yeni Ramos' latest micro lot is sweet and fruity, with flavors of ripe fruit and cherry. It offers notes of jasmine and apple on the nose and has a juicy finish.
You can find Yeni's coffee here
Try our new micro pairings together to taste the nuances against each other, or enjoy the coffees individually. They're premium taste experiences and some of the best we have to offer right now.
