The El Crucero family of coffees was introduced to us through La Real Expedición Botánica (LaREB), an exclusive collective of coffee producers in Colombia.

Only in existence for a short time, LaREB has received continued guidance and education on processing technologies and quality control. Ana Mustafá is the director of the collective, and her family have been coffee farmers in the region for nearly 80 years. She is the third generation and now runs the coffee farms alongside her father and cousin Claudia. For the majority of their life they sold commodity coffee to local collectives where prices are set by the FNC. There is very minimal focus on quality improvement or traceability, and a stronger reliance upon overall yield. However, about 3 years ago Ana was introduced to the specialty coffee market where quality and transparency is valued and incentivized. From this point, she began selling specialty lots through LaREB and we feel fortunate to partner with her on this new path. Experimentation and innovation now play a much bigger role at the farm and we love to see this kind of development and progress.

This El Crucero lot comes from the Castillo variety and is grown at an elevation of around 1600 MASL. This particular coffee is picked over the course of 4 days and processed through a system that Ana calls fed batch washed; instead of waiting to depulp the entire harvest together, the cherries are depulped and washed day over day which blends fermentation times. The coffee is then sun-dried, yielding a sweet, balanced cup with a wonderfully smooth mouthfeel and pleasant, malic acidity.

We continue to be impressed by the quality and variety of coffees that are available to us through our friends at LaREB, and we’re honored to be a part of their work.

Salud!