Colombia | Finca La Lindosa

This intensely aromatic coffee undergoes a 235 hour anaerobic fermentation and you can really get that sense as soon as you open the bag!  Despite the potent aroma, this settles into a surprisingly smooth and balanced cup with nods to all sorts of fruit and sugar notes as is often the case with these wild fermented coffees.

Finca La Lindosa in San Pedro village in Huila is 25 years old, but the tradition of coffee farming in the Cerquera family goes many years further back.  Amin Cerquera is the producer of this delicious natural Colombian coffee, and it is a worthy addition to our recent Colombian offerings, a strong year for this origin.

This coffee is produced using traditional practices including mechanised cleaning with a scythe and manual fertilization three times a year.  The harvested coffee is hand sorted and dried on solar and mechanical dryers.  The farm renews its plants every seven years with a focus on disease-resistant varieties. This coffee's Castillo variety is a great example - finding the balance between disease resistance, cup quality and a good yield is a challenge for many coffee farmers. Castillo is Colombia's answer to this problem: developed by the scientific research institute Cenicafé over many years and officially released in 2005.

This is another example of a Colombian coffee we have recently been able to source, which is transported by sail from origin to Europe.  As we were working towards our B Corp certification, our team were astonished to find out that the vast majority of emissions associated with roasting and selling coffee come at the farm and transport level.  All the work we had been doing to improve our impact at a local level to that point was shown in perspective: it turns out responsible sourcing is the most impactful way for a coffee roaster to control their impact on the planet.

Belco, based in France and our partner for many years, has been grappling with the same issue on their sustainability journey and has come up with an innovative solution to sharply reduce transport emissions: sending coffee containers to Europe on specially designed ships powered by sails instead of oil.