Carlos Albán Canpo owns Finca El Guyabo, which is located in the El Tambo municipality of Cauca, Colombia. He and his wife bought the farm initially to focus on livestock farming, but they noticed that their neighbors were growing coffee and earning a good living from their yields. They decided to plant a single hectare of their farmland as an experiment, and they are also interested in alloting space for the depulping and a larger drying area.
Amazingly, this coffee is Carlos's first time selling to a specialty market: He has previously tendered his coffee on the local market, but heard that he had the chance to earn a better price if his coffee was good quality. Not only is it good quality, it's a stunner.
Finca El Guayabo is a 7-hectare farm that has only 1 hectare planted in coffee, about 5,000 trees in a mix of Castillo and Colombia cultivars. The coffee is picked ripe between May and July, depulped the same day and put through azaranda, a kind of mesh sorting table that separates out lower quality coffee. The beans are then fermented in open tanks for 17–18 hours and washed four or five times before being laid in a parabolic dryer. Drying takes around eight days.
For more infromation about coffee production in Colombia, visit our Colombia Origin Page.
