A wonderful representation of the best from Colombia has just arrived and will be placed in production immediately. Frutas de Popayan holds a floral perfume like fragrance, balanced body and acidity with flavors of citrus and cherry.

We were able to travel to Colombia as part of the Las Mingas project, a program initiated by Virmax and Castle & Co. in collaboration with Geoff Watts. It was created in order to provide better quality coffees and award premiums based on the quality of the coffee. Colombian coffee has long been a simple process whereby the buyer simply approves or rejects coffee by the container. These containers would be mixed of a blend by a minimum of 50 anonymous farmers and no matter how good (or in some cases bad) any farmer’s coffee was, they would get the same base price from the co-op and Federation that everyone else received. The Las Minga Project was then created as a extremely labor and process intensive program by which coffee was bought from farmers at a base price and then premiums would be awarded to the farmer based on quality. This program is unparalleled and incomparable to anything else in Colombia. Premiums to farmers are double or triple fair trade prices, and are based on quality as opposed to being a privatized farm subsidy.

Prior to traveling to Colombia, we cupped coffees from 30 different Las Mingas farmers to create our own ‘Frutas de Popayan’ Colombian Blend featuring our own handpicked profile of flavors. In addition, our Top Farms were separated as Micro Lots from farmers like Wilford Delgado, Jose Olmos and Hector Quintero, giving not only a great premiums but also accolades and personal credit for their great work.