Manos Juntas, Colombia

Colombia Manos Juntas leads with the flavour of passionfruit cooked down to a jam, with candy-like sweetness and a lively, boozy tang. Mild cacao gives the cup a chocolate note, while a hint of slow-cooked tomato adds a savoury depth to the tropical fruit.

The growers and the mill

Manos Juntas is a micromill in Sotará, in Colombia’s Cauca region. The farms that supply this lot sit between 1,400 and 2,000 metres above sea level, where elevation and winds from the Pacific help keep growing conditions cool. The growers cultivate Castillo, a Colombian variety developed by the country’s coffee research centre, Cenicafé, and released in 2005 for its resistance to coffee leaf rust.

During the May–August harvest, local growers deliver ripe coffee cherries to Manos Juntas on the day they pick them. Banexport, which operates the mill, buys the cherries by weight and pays growers upfront at a fixed price above the local market rate. For a grower who would otherwise wait 35–40 days for coffee to dry before selling it, that means getting paid at harvest. Sharing the mill also gives surrounding farms access to fermentation tanks, drying facilities and storage without each family having to buy and maintain its own equipment.

How this coffee is processed

When the cherries arrive, the mill team records their sugar level, measured in degrees Brix, and their acidity, measured by pH. The whole cherries then go into sealed tanks, each labelled with the grower’s name so the team can trace the lot back to the farm. During the five-day anaerobic fermentation, the team introduces nitrogen into the tanks and tracks how the sugar and acidity change to judge when fermentation has reached its endpoint.

The cherries then rest in tanks for another five days before moving to solar dryers. Here, the coffee dries inside the whole cherry, with the skin and fruit still surrounding the seed. This stage takes 30–45 days. Once dry, each lot is cupped to assess its flavour and quality before the dried fruit is milled away and the green coffee is prepared for export.