Looking for a Colombian coffee farm with a beach view? Or maybe you prefer a snow capped peak. The Santa Marta Sierra Nevada, in the department of Magdalena, is a Caribbean coastal range distinct from the Andes range that makes up the majority of Colombia’s coffeelands. From the beach town of Santa Marta, it’s a short trek to the village of San Javier, where the snow capped peak, nearly 6000 meters above sea level, is hard to miss. This is where Dario Delgado and his family have owned and operated a 270-acre estate called Finca Puerto Rico since 2004. Coffee is cultivated under a canopy of guamo, carbonero, and other native shade trees. There is also a regular stream of cloud cover drawn from nearby ocean moisture. Dario has dedicated much of his time to making his coffee farms ecologically sustainable and bird-friendly. He has certifications from the Rainforest Alliance and the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center (SMBC), and organic fertilizer is produced on his farms with compost originating from coffee pulp and manure. In recent years, Dario’s daughter, Iliana, has joined her father to help create a micro-lot program for the specialty coffee market. This lot is a hallmark of their efforts. During the harvest a great deal of care and focus is dedicated to picking the best quality cherries, which are delivered to the wet-mill located at the estate. At the mill, the cherries are sorted with a mechanical washer that removes foreign material and it does the first sorting separating immature and dried cherries from the mass of perfectly ripened cherries. After ripe cherries are clean, these are transported to a stainless steel silo where we have an initial maceration of 24 hours. Then the cherries are mechanically depulped and fermented for another 24 hours. Next, the coffee is washed in an eco washer (a centrifuge designed to use a small quantity of recycled water) to remove the last remnants of pulp from every seed. The washed coffee is transported to a horizontal-silos (guardiola) and mechanically dried with hot air for almost 50 hours. Dried coffee is stored in 40 kilo jute bags and kept in a warehouse at the farm for about 3 weeks and then transported to the dry-mill in Santa Marta, which Dario owns and Iliana manages. At the dry-mill, coffee is evaluated and assigned a storage location to be processed for export. The mill is designed to carefully sort micro-lots. The Santa Marta port is less than 15 minutes from the dry-mill, which means coffee containers avoid long transport and delays at the port.
