This Nariño regional blend is from farmers growing coffee around the towns of Tablón de Goméz, Buesaco, and La Unión. Our importer partner Caravela collected crops from smallholder farmers in northern Nariño with the end goal of building a coffee with dense, sweet flavors, and confection-like aromas. The remaining part of this blend was grown near the town of La Unión, was imported by our friends at LaREB, and grown by Árlex Muñoz.

Colombia is the northern-most country in South America and shares it northern border with Panama. Narino department is in the southern-most coffee growing region of colombia along its border with Ecuador. For the coffees grown in the communities of Tablon de Gomez and Buesaco, Caravela Coffee collected crops from smallholder farmers, focusing on coffees with dense and sweet flavors, and confection-like aromas. Caravela has an office in the nearby town of Los Rosales, where their tasters decide which coffees get blended to make this lot.

The other part of this blend comes from Árlex Muñoz, brought to us by La Real Expedición Botánica. La REB is a farmer's organization founded by Ana Mustafá and Herbert Peñazola with the goal of helping farmers across Colombia improve coffee growing practices and processing techniques. As coffee quality increases, so does the price paid for the coffee, and La REB works to connect farmers with buyers all over the world.

Árlex's farm, near the town of La Union, sits all the way up at 2000 meters above sea level (about 6500 feet), and is on a very steep mountainside - very typical for coffee fars in Nariño. These inclines make the access roads and paths to the farm pretty difficult to traverse, especially when carrying heavy bags of coffee cherries during harvest time. Arlex had an innovative solution: after the cherries are picked and put in bags, he keeps those bags there, rather than carrying them down the hill immediately. When he's picked enough, a portable depulper (the machine that removes the fruit from the seeds - aka coffee beans) is brought up into the field itself, and the coffee is actually depulped among the trees! Then, the depulped coffee (aka parchment) is carried down the slope to the fermentation tanks to continue the traditional washed process.

This creative workflow solution actually led to an unexpected jump in quality: as the coffee cherries sit in those sealed bags waiting to be depulped, some of them begin to ferment - some for up to four days, some for only a few hours. It was this varying degree of fermentation, and the super unique complexity, structured acidity and creamy body that it brings, which inspired the "fed-batch" process that fellow LaREB member and founder Ana Mustafà uses on her farm! (We've roasted her coffee in the Fruity profile, and currently have her Decaf!).