Producer: Rodrigo Sánchez Valencia
Farm: Finca Monteblanco
Region: Huila
Variety: Purple Caturra
Process: Natural
Altitude: 1730 masl
Harvested: 2023
Cupping notes: Lime, papaya, star fruit, Greek yoghurt, rummy, tropical fruits.
Transparency.
What we paid:
-Coffee: 17.68€/Kg
-Shipping: 0.24€/Kg
-Packaging: 1.50€/bag
Quantity bought: 210 Kg
Meet the farmer.
Finca Monteblanco's approach to sustainable specialty coffee production is characterised by unique combinations of special varieties and processes. One example is Monteblanco Purple Caturra Natural.
Finca Monteblanco is a family farm in Vereda La Tocora in the San Adolfo municipality. The farm is managed by Rodrigo Sanchez Valencia, who follows the tradition of coffee cultivation that his grandfather started.
Rodrigo took part in a community program in 2002, which aimed to teach the children of coffee producers how to cup. Before that, neither Rodrigo nor his family had considered coffee in terms of its cup profile. By learning how to differentiate between profiles, Rodrigo, his father, and his grandfather could connect their farming techniques with coffee's attributes in the cup.
Rodrigo also started to learn about cupping competitions that evaluate the best coffee lots from farms in a region. He observed that some farms would win in one year but never again. This made him curious about producing high-quality coffee consistently. To achieve this, he began to explore the trees planted on Monteblanco, where he discovered several coffee varieties his grandfather had grown in the 1980s.
One of these varieties is Purple Caturra, a type of Caturra whose cherries ripen to a deep purple colour.
In 2017, coffees displaying the unique varieties and processes used at Finca Monteblanco won first place in the Yara Championship. He placed second the following year with another lot from Finca Monteblanco. In 2019, Rodrigo participated in the Roasters United competition, winning first place with a washed purple caturra and third place with the same variety.
Rodrigo takes pride in the fact that he, along with his wife Claudia Samboni, farm manager Don Gerardo, and the team working in the fields and at the mill, have achieved consistent quality at Finca Monteblanco. Every harvest, the farm produces micro lots that are used as competition coffees around the world. Additionally, Monteblanco also consistently produces containers of delicious coffees that appear on café menus and retail shelves throughout the year. This has been made possible by applying an ethic of rigorous monitoring, planning, and management at each stage of production and processing, which allows all the coffees from Monteblanco to showcase their full potential.
Because of the changing climate, harvesting and processing at Monteblanco have had to adapt and evolve. Instead of a concentrated peak, the harvest is now dispersed throughout ten months of the year. The coffees from Monteblanco are milled and prepared for export at the new, state-of-the-art Aromas del Sur dry mill in Pitalito.
