Now Roasting: Colombia - El Faldón

Hi Partner,

El Faldón is one of our most cherished farm relationships. Rubén Dario Gómez produces immaculate coffee in the lush mountains above Caicedo, Antioquia, in northwestern Colombia.

Processed with a long and cool fermentation, this fully washed selection of the Bourbon and Chiroso varieties has incredible fruit complexity. Look for peach, orange, mango, pineapple, lime, and strawberry, rounded out by delicious panela and caramel notes.

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...