Bolivia

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.

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.

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.

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.