Our coffees

The Asociación de Productores de Café del Oriente Caucano (ASORCAFÉ) is based in the municipality of Inzá, Cauca. Founded in 2010 by 10 producers, the group now has 450 smallholder members spread across the valleys of the Macizo Colombiano.
Inzá is located on the border of Cauca, Huila and Tolima states, and benefits from a stable climate thanks to it’s proximity to the surrounding mountains, humid weather patterns from the west and dry winds form the south. Coffee is harvested year round, with the main crop being in November-March. Despite being in a relatively small geographical location, ASORCAFÉ producer a staggering number of profiles. The group has 5 buying points on various sides of the mountain, and there are a number of microclimates that producers benefit from.

Due to long standing traditions of land division through inheritance, the average farm size in the state of Cauca is less than a hectare. As such, cooperatives such as ASORCAFÉ play an incredibly important role in the region, allowing smallholders to share resources and negotiate collectively to fetch better prices for their coffees. In many ways ASORCAFÉ is more like a small town than alliance of coffee producers. For an annual fee, they provide social security, health benefits, bereavement leave, even funeral costs are covered by the association. They have rigorous entry standards, such as having clean and well maintained fermentation tanks and pulpers. These standards are not based solely on coffee quality; having (or working towards having) a plot of food crops to ensure self sustaining food security is another entry condition. Entry also allows access to fertilisers, including pre-finance if a member doesn’t have the liquidity. It also gives access to their seed bank – producers mark the trees on their farms that give the best quality, then reserve some of these cherries to give to other producers in the association. In this way, low yield trees with poor cup quality are replaced by higher yielding trees with the best cup profiles. As a result, the rising tide really does lift all boats, as every producer works together to improve the association as a whole, rather than working individually or in competition with their neighbours.

Doi Pangkhon has come a long way in a short time. We partnered with this farmer group in Chiang Rai in 2016. While the coffee is still relatively new to the international market, the 300 Akha Hilltribe farmers at Doi Pangkhon (which means Timberland Peak) have been growing and milling coffee for almost 40 years in this area, respecting their old traditions and their natural environment.
The mineral-rich soil and next-to-perfect growing conditions give not just their old varieties, but even their Catimor shrubs a surprising complexity and spicy punch. This sparked Ata and Pupae, brother and sister and third generation coffee growers, to actively seek the involvement of specialty buyers. Each farmer typically produces about 1-2 tons of parchment. We are working with about 20 families from Doi Pangkhon. Essentially, these are microlots grouped together. All of the villagers belong to Akha Hilltribe and they are very young for coffee farmers, mostly aged 25-35 years old. This is something very unique about Thailand as an origin since it’s an upper middle income country. It is a coffee growing industry that’s actually working and attractive to the next generation, relative to other origins.

One of only a few groups in Thailand to employ a Kenya-style washed, double fermentation: all coffee is hand picked, depulped, dry fermented for 48 hours, wet fermented for 8 hours, washed with mountain water, then sun dried on raised bamboo beds.

The result is a very clean coffee with typical ‘Asian’ spicy flavors, but combined with a sweetness not often found in other Asian coffees.

This exceptional lot was processed, dry milled and exported by Testi Coffee, a family-run business owned and managed by the Yonis family. Faysel A. Yonis established Testi Coffee in 2009 as a coffee exporting company.

Today, Testi owns and/or operates washing stations in Guji, Yirgacheffe, Sidamo and Limu – all premier coffee producing regions. They work with smallholder farmers, intending to secure the very best prices for their coffee so that they can pay fair prices for the cherry delivered. They are currently also building a warehouse in Shakiso where they can process natural coffees locally, in the region where the coffee is grown. This keeps more revenue in the communities where the coffees are produced.

Testi’s objective is quality and building long term business relationships. Their washing stations are very well run and they do diligent work through sorting and screening to get clean and quality beans for export. Testi always adheres to the very highest quality standards to prepare and deliver nothing but high-quality beans.

As of 2018, Testi has launched a quality improvement project at each washing stations that they operate. Their PCS (Premium Cherry Selection) Project fully controls all aspects of harvest and processing to ensure that the fantastic natural quality of the coffee is maintained at each step. They are also making the most of the market liberalisation to benefit the small producers that they work with. Social projects, such as building new classrooms for the local school near their Guji processing factory are also important, and with support from their importing partners they hope to do even more in the future. They also currently have a drinking/household water provisioning project underway in Guji, and they plan to extend this to other communities in the future.

The name ‘Testi’ means Happy or Happiness in Harrari language (it is also the name of Faysel’s middle son). Certainly, Testi is bringing happiness to small scale producers and us!

It is located in one of our favorite regions in Ethiopia: Guji woreda. The coffee cherries come from farmers in the Shakiso region. About 800 smallholder farmers deliver their coffee cherries to the Gigesa washing station where the coffee cherries are processed. The farms that supply Gigesa are located at 1800 to 2000 meters above sea level. Gigesa washing station exports about 6 containers of coffee every year.

The coffee is very layered and complex with flavors of peach, lemon, and hibiscus.

Our Brazilian coffee comes from Capricornio. They established Capricornio to breathe new life in five regions in the southern states of Paraná and São Paolo, which until the 1960s, were one of the country’s most vibrant coffee producing regions. Due to terrible frosts and the rise of the major coffee regions up north, its production stagnated, leading many coffee farmers to move north, leaving their farms underdeveloped. Now, due to climate change, these regions have become attractive to farmers again, but hardly anyone saw specialty potential.
That is until Capricornio found 20 passionate farmers and started the Four Seasons project: they helped them turn their farms into modern, ecologically sustainable farms and process their coffees to the highest standards.

Now, they have started to show what these coffee regions have to offer the specialty coffee world. Because of its uniquely low latitude (around the tropic of Capricorn at 23ºS), coffee here endures more stress while developing. This leads to large, slowly ripened cherries with surprisingly complex cup profiles, similar to what happens at higher altitudes. We were impressed not only by the coffee’s cup quality, but by the company’s achievements in processing and creating coffees in close cooperation with specialty roasters.

The Dulce has a classic Brazilian cup profile: good body and sweetness, mild acidity and loads of nutty and chocolate flavours. Very good everyday espresso.