Colombia

Colombia lies at the northwestern extreme of South America, a continent whose western flank is marked by the majestic Andes mountain range. The Andes run northward in an unbroken line through the full length of Chile, continuing on through Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador before crossing the Equator into southern Colombia. There, they divide into three separate cordilleras, effectively tripling the area suitable for growing exceptional coffee. These three massive Colombian mountain ranges are separated by two broad valleys, falling away to the Amazon basin in the east, the Pacific Ocean in the west, and the Caribbean in the north. The country’s extraordinary topography has made it home to an exceptional degree of biodiversity, a dizzying number of microclimates, and a seemingly endless array of coffee profiles. Add in the fact that Colombia is exporting coffee all year round, and it is easy to see why Colombia is a coffee buyer’s dream.

For most of Colombia’s history as a coffee producer, the focus of its coffee sector has been the departments of Caldas, Quindío, and Risaralda—collectively referred to as the country’s Eje Cafetero, or Coffee Axis. In recent years, however, the coffee sector’s center of gravity has made a pronounced shift southward to the departments of Cauca, Huila, and Nariño, sometimes called the Eje de Calidad, or Quality Axis. Our direct trade sourcing program in Colombia is firmly anchored in these three departments, where we partner with three quality-focused exporters and one farmer organization to source some of the country’s best smallholder coffees. We have also revived a project sourcing organic coffees in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, a mountain range on Colombia’s Atlantic coast, separate from the Andes.

The section below introduces the four regions, four partners, and five projects in our Colombia direct trade program.

In 2016, together with our partners at Banexport, we started working with a handful of growers in the rugged hills around the municipality of Sotará in Cauca committed to improving the quality of their coffee. There were fewer than ten growers in that original group, but they shared our belief in quality as the most reliable way to increase coffee’s value, and they were willing to work to achieve their vision. We called them “pioneers” because they were the first in their community to embrace a quality-first approach to coffee. Since then, we have taken a similar approach in two different communities in Huila, and we have applied the same pioneros name to those projects, as well.

As the saying goes, nothing succeeds like success. Those original eight pioneros have demonstrated that investments in quality can generate financial returns, and the number of people involved in the project has grown steadily. Today, there are more than eighty Pioneros de Sotará. Banexport’s field work in Sotará between our sourcing visits is essential to ensuring continuous progress in our shared pursuit of quality.

Huila is home to more than 100,000 farmers who collectively produce nearly one in every five pounds of coffee grown in the country. More important, this region in southwestern Colombia is the zone that also produces the highest proportion of specialty coffee of all the country’s coffee origins. Huila’s reputation for exceptional quality was cemented in the past decade as it dominated the prestigious Cup of Excellence competition and earned a hard-core following worldwide. Today, Huila continues to be recognized as the most prolific maker of explicitly delicious coffees in a nation known for being one of the top-quality producers in the world.

Colombia’s best coffee exporters are among the very best in the world, and Azahar is among the very best in the entire country. Beyond its crisp execution and steady delivery of truly fine coffees, Azahar delivers some of the deepest dives on farm data of anyone in the industry, setting new standards for transparency and pioneering a radical approach to sustainability that takes a household-level view of the livelihoods of the growers in its supply network. We have been proudly working with Azahar and a small number of pioneering growers in the municipality of Oporapa, Huila, to deliver together on coffee’s promise to drive lasting impact and sustainable local development in the communities where coffee is grown.

San Agustín, Huila, lies at the precise place where the Colombian Andes divide into three cordilleras, creating an exceptional environment for coffee growing. But the appeal of these landscapes predates coffee’s introduction to Colombia by millennia —it has been the site of continuous human settlement for some 5,000 years, and it’s home to the most important pre-Colombian archeological sites in the country.

The Pioneros de San Agustín consist of dozens of smallholder growers who have been growing coffee for years, but who have only recently committed to putting quality first. The results of our collaboration with these pioneering growers and our partners at Inconexus have been impressive. The community lots are among the very best we source from Colombia each year, and Inconexus helps us to separate single-farm and varietal lots of exceptional quality, including lots of Pink Bourbon and an uncommon coffee from an uncommon farm that has become a mainstay on our Colombia single-origin menu: the washed Tabi lot from Didier Anacona’s El Porvenir farm.

Our vice president of coffee and green coffee buyer for Colombia, Geoff Watts, has served as a judge on more than twenty Cup of Excellence juries, including the 2010 Colombia competition held in Nariño, where the hometown coffees dominated. Nariño farms took the top six spots, eight of the top ten, seventeen of twenty-one winning lots overall, and something else exceptionally rare: an overall winner that earned a perfect 100-point score from one of the judges. That winning lot from Buesaco, and the number of truly extraordinary coffees from Nariño, grabbed Geoff’s attention, and he has been traveling to the region to source Nariño coffee ever since.

After the 2010 Cup of Excellence (CoE) event in Nariño described above, we began poking around Buesaco with our friends at Inconexus, and we connected with Franco José Héctor López, a grower who took eighth place that year with a lot from his small farm, La Mina. Over each of the next few years, we pulled together small lots from the farms of past CoE winners from the area and offered them under the name “Amigos de Buesaco.” The specific farms in our Buesaco selections have changed from one year to the next, but La Mina has always anchored our sourcing work there.

There is nothing especially conspicuous about La Mina—it looks like a lot of the other farms scattered across the gently rolling hills of Buesaco—but the attention to detail sets it apart. Its selective cherry harvesting, obsessive selection, and meticulous processing have made it one of the country’s most decorated farms, with five CoE wins. In recent years, Franco José’s daughter Cielo and son-in-law Nilson have pushed their way into the core of the Amigos de Buesaco project with coffees from their farm El Bado, which has some CoE hardware of its own, including top honors in 2012.

Shortly after we launched our Amigos de Buesaco initiative, we expanded our sourcing operations in Nariño to include growers in Linares, a municipality in the region’s western highlands better known for producing sugarcane and coca leaf than coffee. We collaborated in the effort with the international humanitarian agency Catholic Relief Services, whose Borderlands coffee project there was focused on building relationships between growers committed to producing quality coffee and buyers committed to paying premiums for it. Over four seasons, we worked closely with the project to advance its objectives, in part by cultivating a relationship with the determined growers of Arcafé, a smallholder farmer cooperative short on specialty experience but long on motivation. Through field visits, post-harvest processing advice, strategy meetings, sensory exercises, commercial pilots, and other activities, we worked to help Arcafé build the skills it needed to produce quality coffee consistently and thrive in the specialty marketplace. The project ended in 2016, but our relationship didn’t. We continue to source coffee from Arcafé every year, working to separate the best of each harvest for our single-origin menu.

The Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta is the world’s highest coastal mountain range, rising dramatically out of the Caribbean through thick highland jungle to rocky, snow-capped peaks. It is geologically separate from the Andes range that is home to the rest of Colombia’s coffee origins.

In 2018, we revived a dormant project in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta with Inconexus focused on the Plan Mil Organic Women’s Coffee Association. The first few seasons have been focused on sourcing high-quality organic coffee for use in our El Gallo and Black Cat Organic blends, with plans for a second phase to identify and separate higher-quality lots to offer as organic single origins.