When coffee is cultivated and harvested from small family owned farms, exporters play a critical role in ensuring quality and fairness. Cafetos de Segovia is an export company in Nueva Segovia established in 2015 by two sisters (Ana y Martha Albir Sotomayor) with a focus on transparency so that importers and roasters can have the best access to information all the way back to the farm level. The model is the perfect hybrid where individual farmers take responsibility for farm management and most of the post harvest process with support from Cafetos de Segovia to ensure that each farmer has access to best practices.
Processing Details
During the harvest, cherries are picked at optimum ripeness, hand sorted, floated to remove damaged and undeveloped beans, depulped, fermented for 24 hours, washed, and density sorted in classification channels at each individual farm. Wet parchment is then transported to Cafetos de Segovia’s drying facility and slowly dried to 10.5 percent using a combination of patios with shade cloth and raised beds. This is an innovative step that takes the burden of drying infrastructure and labor costs off of the farmers and also ensures more uniform and gentle drying with strict temperature controls to preserve the unique quality of each farmer's post harvest efforts.
Exporting Details
Cafetos de Segovia cups each farmer’s lot and also prepares the coffee for export at their own dry mill, which ensures traceability and quality control throughout the entire process. While the focus is exporting individual producer lots, this lot called Loma Fria, is a blend with contributions from many producer lots to showcase the diversity of the Nueva Segovia profile and the consistency in processing among the Cafetos de Segovia group of producers.
