El Faldón

We first tasted coffee from Don Rubén in 2015 while visiting Pergamino, now our longtime suppliers in Colombia. His was an immediate standout on the cupping table, a coffee simply too good to direct to a bigger volume community lot. Since then, we have bought every subsequent harvest offered to us, totaling nearly 20 due to the biennial production cycle in this part of Colombia.

As a younger man, Rubén worked as a jornalero, or day laborer, traveling to farms all over Antioquia picking coffee and performing other manual work. After 20 years, he had finally saved enough money to buy a plot of land in an area called El Noque, near the town of Caicedo. Initially people cautioned him that coffee would not grow in this location - reaching 2,100 meters, the farm was thought to be too high and the climate too cold. And while these conditions can certainly pose a challenge for productivity, the quality of the coffee he planted proved to be spectacular...