Adventure through two different coffee regions:

Colombia El Puente / Honey

The El Puente processing facility is owned and operated by Rodrigo Sanchez and his wife Claudia Samboni, under the umbrella of their company Aromas del Sur; which includes several farms, cupping labs, and a state-of-the-art dry mill, in the Palestina region of southern Huila.

Although there are small wet-mills on Rodrigo’s farms, he made the decision to construct El Puente so that he could increase overall production capacity. Having a centralized mill that can process large amounts of coffee cherries from several farms allows him to grow more coffee without overwhelming the staff at his existing mills, giving them the time they need to carefully process high quality micro-lots.

That’s not to say that the larger lots coming from El Puente are of lesser quality. The facility itself was specifically designed to process large amounts of coffee cherries and it is outfitted with the necessary equipment to do just that. Additionally, the staff running El Puente are some of the most skilled coffee professionals in all of Huila.

Ethiopia Chelchele / Natural

Ethiopia Koke / Natural

Yirgacheffe (which translates to “Land of Many Springs”) has perhaps the perfect terroir for producing high quality coffee; the combination of altitude, biodiversity, and proximity to water sources is simply unmatched.

The climate is warm and temperate, with wet summers and dry winters, providing structured seasons for growing, harvesting, and processing coffee. To the naked eye the hills of Yirgacheffe appear to be heavily forested, but in reality they are densely populated with villages of farmers growing what is commonly referred to as “garden” coffee.

The majority of these farmers are multi-generational producers, who operate on just a few acres of land, more similar in size to gardens than full production farms.

These producers typically sell their coffee as whole cherries to centralized mills, which help to establish distinct flavor profiles through implementing meticulous standards for sorting, grading, and processing coffee.