Juan Chamorro- Relationship Coffee

Building relationships with coffee producers is an important part of creating sustainability within the coffee industry. Buying coffee from the same producer year after year has many advantages for both the producer and roaster since it involves real, personal connection where it transforms from a business transaction to a partnership. Roasters can help impact the quality of the coffee being produced and offer the reliability for producers to improve upon coffee lots continuously, with the trust that the producer has someone to purchase their coffee. As a roaster, when we have a direct relationship with a producer, we can ask them to try different procedures in their processing to improve the cup and then can pay them more to offset these costs. When we develop these partnerships, the coffee is not just a number on a spreadsheet, it is a producer who we know and we can understand their challenges and can strive to work with them to overcome these things.

Juan Chamorro is a producer who we have now bought coffee from twice since meeting him on our origin trip to Colombia in the fall of 2023. Santiago and two of our team members, Kristen B. and Kat had the opportunity to spend a whole day with Juan, his wife Kamilla and his daughter Gabriella back in September. They spent a memorable day touring all the areas of the farm and roastery he has built and enjoyed a delicious lunch with the family.

Juan is a young producer who has taken on his family farm and is actively working on modernizing coffee farming. He has a coffee roastery and a coffee lab right on his farm which is not typical for a small farm to have. They do all of the processing of the cherries right at the farm, which again is unique for a coffee farm to do everything from fermenting to wet milling and to dry milling on site. Usually the dry milling will happen at the exporter but Juan has built something more integrated. He even uses the parchment layer once hulled off the coffee seeds to fuel the mechanical dryers.

We love Juan's coffee and plan to continue our partnership with him into the future!