As part of our new coffee program, Peter Giuliano of Counter Culture Coffee offered to explain a little bit about each of these four new coffees we’re bringing on. Of course, I said “of course!”. Here’s his first installment, describing “La Golondrina” Guarapamba coffee.

Back in the late ’50s, Colombia was trying hard to establish its reputation as a coffee growing country. In one of the greatest advertising strokes of genius ever, the advertising agency Doyle Dane Bernbach decided to use the fact that essentially all of Colombia’s coffee is grown by small farmers as a marketing tool. You see, up to that time, the coffee industry thought that large haciendas produced better coffee than small farmers, and Colombia had no large haciendas to speak of. Meanwhile, they were competing with their neighbor Brazil, where the farms were (and are) large and efficient. So, in the spirit of turning a bug into a feature, they invented Juan Valdez, the symbolic small coffee farmer. Like most real Colombian farmers, Juan grows and processes the coffee himself, and brings it to market each week.

Unfortunately, the second part of the Colombian strategy kind of threw the “small farmer” part out of the window. The Colombian Coffee Federation, who controls the Colombian coffee industry and owns the Juan Valdez trademark, pursued a strategy of homogenizing the small farmer coffees, creating the familiar Colombian Supremo and Colombian Exelso marks. These are the mega-brands of Colombian coffee, and contain a mixture of various coffees from various farms in various regions, not unlike modern milk brands. Predictable quality, yeah, but nothing exciting. You wind up mixing the excellent, the average, and the fair qualities to get a sort of “medium-good” quality. Colombia got a reputation for being consistently, well, predictable.

Of course, I always wanted to try and get down to the farmer level, and taste farm-specific Colombian coffees, which have always been impossible to obtain and get out of the country. A few years ago, though, I started hearing about Giancarlo Gianetti and Alejandro Cadenas, two Colombians who were trying to buck the system and get higher-quality unhomogenized coffees out of Colombia. They called their project “Las Mingas”, which is a local word meaning something like “The Team” which symbolized farmers, a few roasters, and themselves as intermediaries working as a team to move these coffees. I began traveling to Colombia to taste some of the coffees they were finding, and I was blown away. Pretty soon, we started spreading out through the Colombian region of Cauca to find coffees.

That first year, I tasted hundreds of lots of coffees, calling our project “La Golondrina”. Some were spectacular, others, not so much. I ranked them all, and we had a special awards ceremony in Popayan to honor the farmers who scored over 80 points on our 100 point scale. Three lots of coffee scored over 92. Two of those lots were from an indigenous collective of tiny farmers in the remote and dangerous mountains of Eastern Cauca called the Guarapamba.

Guarapamba coffee is consistently amazing. Flavor notes of cherry, vanilla, and caramel pretty much explode from this coffee the minute it is ground. Why so special? Well, these guys are so remote, they are still growing the heirloom Typica and Caturra strains of coffee, while most of Colombia has switched to modern hybrids. In addition, they practice very traditional Incan agricultural methods, including planting and harvesting according to lunar cycles. The high altitude and cool nights of their mountainous reservation doesn’t hurt, either. Anyway, when we thought about a pairing with caramelized pound cake, crème fraiche and fruit, what could go better than a coffee with caramel, vanilla, and fruit notes? This is the real small-farmer coffee of Colombia, and friends, it is spectacular.

Thanks, Peter, for taking the time to properly introduce us to this coffee.