SANCTUM OV BONES, Colombia

Suitable for all brewing methods.

Roasters Notes: Pineapple, Cola, Cherry, Cacao

Café Granja La Esperanza was founded in 1945, when Juan Antonio Herrera and Blanca Ligia Correa took the land at Finca Potosí in Valle del Cauca and planted it to coffee. Typica stood there first. Juan Antonio widened the planting over the years that followed, bringing in Yellow and Red Bourbon and Caturra, and the holding passed down through a family of fourteen children. In the late 1990s his grandsons Rigoberto and Luis Eduardo Herrera took the business on, turned the farms to organic production, and bought the ground near Trujillo that became Finca La Esperanza. Three generations, one doctrine, held without deviation.

The family now keeps five farms strung across the Andes, Potosí, Cerro Azul, Las Margaritas, La Esperanza and Hawaii, each sited to its own microclimate and planted accordingly. Their standing was sealed in 2008, when Rigoberto took first place at Best of Panama with a Geisha, and the house turned decisively toward rare varieties from that point on. More than fifty international awards have followed. In 2021 they opened Colombia's first private coffee auction, and by its fifth edition a single lot of theirs drew 2,194 US dollars per kilogram. Little of what they grow reaches the open market. Most of it is spoken for before it is picked.

This lot comes off La Esperanza at Trujillo, drawn from 2.8 hectares of Java standing between 1,450 and 1,620 metres, under 1,901 millimetres of rain a year. That band is the lot's own, not the farm's. Java is not a Colombian variety and never was. It descends from an Ethiopian landrace carried to Indonesia, then to Cameroon in the 1950s, where it was held under selection for some twenty years before release, and it only reached the Americas through CIRAD in 1991. It remains scarce wherever it grows, tall and slow and unwilling to be hurried, kept by the few growers with the altitude and the patience to carry it. In Colombia it is rarer still, which is why the lots that do appear are claimed before most ever hear of them.

Natural processed. Whole cherry, dried intact, the fruit held on the seed until the sugars have gone inward. Nothing added, nothing taken away. The method is the family's own standard, applied without embellishment to a variety that asks for none.