Tasting Notes:
Lemon Meringue
Iced Tea
Honeydew Melon
Producer:Dayana Rivadeneira
Municipality: Bermejal, Nariño
Processing: Washed with 24hr whole cherry fermentation (aka “reposado”)
Variety: Caturra, variedad Colombia
Altitude: 2200m
Description:
We’ve been intentional about narrowing the focus of our sourcing onto specific regions, or even towns when we’re able to. Recently, much of our buying from Nariño has been centered on one municipality – Buesaco. This town has been churning out a lot of great coffee, and we’ve loved diving deeper into the local flavour of a specific microclimate (and we hope you have too!). This release from Dayana Rivadeneira’s farm is also from the area around Buesaco (Bermejal, to be precise), and it’s a superb example of the growing specialty coffee community in the town. Dayana has been around coffee her entire life, having grown up in a farming family. She officially began her career in coffee taking barista and cupping courses as a teen, and started working for a local co-op. Early in her career she met Frank Torres, a coffee producer, agronomist, and processing specialist from the nearby town of La Union. It was under Frank’s guidance that Dayana began to grow her own coffee on her family’s farm, producing her first lot of specialty coffee at just nineteen years old! Having started coffee roasting in my teens, I bought Dayana’s coffee without even tasting it, motivated only by a kinship with a fellow young person in coffee. This is the third harvest we’ve purchased from Dayana, and I was also fortunate enough to visit Buesaco last fall to meet up with Dayana and Frank. We brewed up some of Rooftop’s roast of Dayana’s coffee (which, funny enough, was old crop to them, since they were already drinking the new harvest) and shared our common experiences as young people in coffee. We then hopped on her motorbike and rode up into the mountains of Bermejal to go see her farm, Finca La Quebrada, where Dayana grew up helping her parents tend to the coffee trees. Many young people in rural parts of Colombia leave for the cities to find work, but Dayana is determined to stay in the mountains and grow her coffee career. In addition to managing her farm, she also partnered with Frank and another young entrepreneur to open Little Berry, a café in Buesaco serving the products of local farmers. She’s also started planting varieties like Gesha, Pink Bourbon, and Sidra on her farm and on another plot she co-manages with her mother. We’re so pleased with this harvest, it’s showing beautifully. Crisp citrus acidity, sofy melon sweetness. We can’t wait to see what’s next for Dayana and this new generation of Buesaco producers.
-Keegan