I flew to Colombia in March for the San Fermín harvest, the first time I'd been back to the co-op in three years. My phone died on the second day and stayed dead, so there are no photos. What survived is a notebook full of smudged pencil and a much clearer sense of where our everyday Colombia comes from.
San Fermín isn't one farm. It's a co-operative of about forty growers spread across the hills above Pitalito, most of them working a few hectares each. We've bought from them for six years now, which in this business counts as a long marriage. The first year was a gamble on a sample. Now it's a phone call and a handshake and a price we negotiate in person when we can.
What you can't taste from here
Standing at the wet mill at six in the morning, watching cherries come in by the sackful from pickers who'd been up the slope since before dawn, the word "washed process" stops being a label and becomes a building full of people doing specific, tiring, skilled work. The selective picking alone — taking only the ripe cherries, leaving the green to come back for next week — is the difference between the clean sweetness we sell and a muddy lot nobody wants.
You can read about traceability on a bag. It's a different thing to shake the hand of the person who picked it.
Doña Marta, who's been the co-op's quality lead since before we started buying, walked me through the fermentation tanks and the raised drying beds and was politely unimpressed by my Spanish. She wanted to talk about rainfall and the price of fertilizer, which are the things that actually decide what next year's coffee tastes like. We talked numbers for an hour. It was the most useful conversation I had all trip.
The point of going isn't romance. It's that the relationship is the product. When the harvest is short or the weather turns, the growers we know call us first, and we pay them fairly enough that they want to. That's why San Fermín is on the shelf at eighteen dollars and tastes the same reliable way every single year. It's not magic. It's six years of showing up.
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