The Colombia Pescador is easily one of the favourite coffee that we source and shines as a stand alone single origin as well as a component of our most popular coffee blends.
This is a coffee that we have been buying since 2011 through our partners Racafe (whom we have worked with since 2007). Prior to 2011 we had been buying a regional Cauca coffee through Racafe, but there was variability of flavour between shipments and being a regional coffee, it could not always be traced back to the grower.
Through cupping together, Racafe was able to understand what we were seeking from Colombia and establish our requirements. They identified coffee from a small area in Cauca that had the cup character and consistency that we wanted. Good acidity and sweetness, light chocolate, brown sugar, citrus, scoring 84-85 points on the SCA scale. From that moment Allpress has not turned back and we have been buying all of, or the vast majority of the Pescador that has been offered to us since then. Fast forward to today and Pescador makes up around 65% of our Colombian purchasing. It works great in our blends and is also a very solid single origin filter coffee that has slotted in nicely as one of our “Always On” options in Australia and NZ as well as being enjoyed as espresso in the UK.
About the Coffee
The coffee is grown in a small area near a small town called Pescador, hence the name. It is grown by around 400 smallholder growers, where the average farm size is around 3 hectares. The producers generally have their own small scale wet-mills on site, but some do share facilities. As these are small and humble farms, they need to support themselves in a diverse way, so it is not only coffee grown around here, also citrus, avocado, sugar cane and yuca.
Racafe work closely with a local partner, Mario Trochez, who operates a buying station in the town of Pescador. He buys processed parchment coffee from the growers. The growers are not contracted to Mario, they are free to sell to anybody, but Mario pays the best prices for quality coffee and as a result, they do like to go to him. He posts daily prices on a board at the buying station, and farmers deliver coffee every day throughout the harvest season. On site is a full grading set up, coffee is graded on the spot and Mario will offer to buy all of it. The best quality coffee is set aside for our “Pescador”, but all grades are in demand.
Improving production quality at origin
In the above photo you can see three piles, the smallest pile is the best quality, which is what we buy, the largest pile is rougher, lesser quality coffee. Racafe and Mario would prefer to see that flipped, and for the majority of the coffee to be the higher grade. So in 2016 they commenced a project to try and help the growers in the Pescador region. They surveyed the producers to try and get a better understanding of what their challenges were, and the main issue identified was the ability to dry the coffee well. Due to the small scale nature of the farms in this area, they had limited floor area to dry coffee. It is also a mountainous region, so there is plenty of cloud and rain during the harvest period. Racafe initiated some educational sessions for the growers, teaching them better practices for drying and processing their coffee, and also provided building materials and plans for the growers to build their own “drying tunnels” – simple, but very effective structures made from wooden framing and plastic sheeting walls and roof, to create a drying area protected from rain and pests.
Racafe’s goal since then is to help 20 farms each off-season (twice yearly in Colombia) to build these drying structures, that is 40 per year since 2016. We have visited and seen this in action, and over recent years we have seen the volume of Pescador increase a lot, and the quality has improved steadily too. The result is a win-win: there is more Pescador grade coffee available for us to purchase each season, and the producers are starting to flip the piles of coffee around, so that the larger portion of their harvest is the higher quality grades, fetching a higher price for them.
This is an amazing example of sustainable, long-term relationships that benefit everybody involved. Racafe are able to reinvest a portion of the premium that we pay for this coffee, the growers get to produce more high-quality coffee and earn more money, and we get more of one of our favourite coffees each year.
