Butter Biscuit & Grapefruit, Colombia

La Claudina is a farm with altitudes from 1400 - 1600 masl, located in Ciudad Bolivar in Antioquia. The farm has about 18 hectares planted with coffee of different varieties. The farm is so steep, when we took a full tour of the farm in December 2018, we had to ride mules to reach the different plots.

Juan Saldarriaga is a young producer who took over his family’s farms in 2012 and started to plant several different and new cultivars, everything from unusual Castillos, Caturras and Tabis to Bourbon, Geisha and SL28s, among others. So far he has been figuring out how each variety performs in the environment. In the future he plans to increase production of the varieties that thrive.

Since we started working with Juan, he has built several different types of drying facilities, changed the processing, and started to manage a few other farms in the area. We are especially surprised by the effect the improved drying has on his coffees. He is drying a lot of our washed coffees under shade, and the naturals in a specially designed mechanical «cold dryer».