Colombia Marisol Ñañez

Product detailed description

Farm: La Correa
Oblast: Huila
Varietal: Pink Bourbon
Altitude: 1700 masl
Harvest: 2025
Importer: Chicas Industry

This is the third year in a row that we have had coffee from this farmer with the same variety and processing. This year we again bought 4 bags (140 kg), it is simply worth it! :) As every year, Marisol's coffee is irresistible. In February it arrived in Brno and we went to get it right away.

It is again a coffee from Chicas Industry from the "mujeres" project, which is a coffee produced by women farmers, which are still quite rare.

We add a description of the coffee, which is taken from Chicas Industry, it is a very interesting read: this special, almost custom-made lot is of the pink bourbon variety. It is a relatively new variety, recently very popular in the Huila region. Farmer Marisol processes her lot of this pink bourbon using the washed method with extended fermentation and has repeatedly had great results. Moreover, Marisol is another of the farmers we want to introduce in our MUJERES project and establish a long-term collaboration with.

General farm information

The Huila region is now one of the most famous among coffee lovers. And it was here that our plans to establish Chicas Industry first began to take shape. We first visited the region in March 2019 and fell in love with the place. Especially the area around Bruselas, a small town near the tourist and coffee-famous city of San Augustin. San Augustin is, among other things, one of the largest coffee producers in the entire region. Moreover, much of the coffee surprises with its quality and the farmers with their knowledge and technological equipment. There are various well-equipped associations and associations among the farmers, and it is no problem to taste the coffee directly from the farmer. We got to know the Ñañez family through Marisol, Mr Oliverio's daughter. She is proactive and smiling, just like her father, whom she follows in growing coffee. Unfortunately, I visited the farm for the first time on my own, without Carolina, because she was currently busy making contacts in Europe and presenting our project, for example, at the Barista of the Year (2020). I, still in Colombia at the time, went to visit our farmers and to see the Ñañezos. It was pouring rain, so for a while it looked like we wouldn't even make it to the farm (or be able to go back). We had to walk a bit, half buried in the mud, but then we were welcomed home by a lady with a coffee in her hand. The rain eased and we went on a tour of the farm.The family takes good care of their plantation, restoring the plants, cutting down weeds. They even decided to partly set up their own coffee nursery and to start restoring parts of the plantation from their own resources. This is because they have discovered a few good varieties among the bushes that they would like to grow in larger quantities. (NB: this is mainly the so-called Bourbon Pimenta, the genetics of which are not proven, but it has good resistance and yield and a more interesting profile than the Colombia variety. It is quite likely that this is not a new variety but only a local mutation.) Marisol is a proactive very young farmer who is not afraid to experiment and believes in her work. She is also an excellent coffee "taster", a Q grader and has experience working for an international company like Caravela. All of this has certainly opened up her path and motivated her to venture beyond the boundaries of traditional coffee processing and handling. In processing her lot, she uses the processes of prolonging the fermentation in the cherry and after the peeling, and follows which "recipe" gives the best and most stable results in the long term. In addition, he also roasts and sells the coffee from the farm under his own Maracafé brand and is involved in a number of projects. From the beginning, we were very attracted by the opportunity to work with Marisol over the long term and to create an environment in which her and our projects can flourish and complement each other. We hope that with our support, other family members will start to believe more in her work and under her guidance we will start to process more of the coffees from La Correa Farm through longer fermentations, as we think this method increases the potential of the coffees grown on the farm.

Farm history

Marisol personally told me her family history something like this, "Originally, my dad and mom lived with my grandmother on my dad's side. But in order to support the family, he traveled to the department of Putumayo to work as a laborer. He was hired to work on coca cultivation. The work was good, and after a few months he told my mom to follow him and us (we were three siblings at the time). 8 days after my mom moved with us, the government started persecuting people who were growing coca and the bombing started. My mom ran away with us and hid us from the planes that were dropping bombs, so she quickly decided to come back to Huila with us and that's when my dad bought a quarter of an acre from one of his brothers and started growing coffee on it. Step by step he bought small plots of land and gradually bought in this way from five different owners about 9 hectares of land on which we have coffee and 2 hectares of nature reserve. Since then we have been working with choice coffee and we have already made a good name for ourselves with our results, we have coffee that has won awards for its quality. Thanks to the natural conditions and the quality of the soil, which is rich in nutrients, our coffee is characterised by its smoothness and balance with notes of citrus and flowers and medium acidity. Thanks to coffee, we can live in peace and have a relatively good life, even though the work on the farm is far from easy and simple." I asked Marisol a few questions: why do you do coffee, Marisol? I mean, it's a privilege to grow up in a family of coffee farmers, where we were involved in everything from a very young age. I've always loved coffee and at the age of ten my dad gave me a piece of land and motivated me even more. Later in 2009 I went to Bogotá to do a course on quality and also physical and sensory analysis of coffee and in 2010 I won a competition and as a prize I got the opportunity to do a Q grader certificate. Later on I completed my technical training in coffee selection to apply all this knowledge on the farm. I also ran a women's association for 5 years with my own coffee products (mainly roasted coffee) and this helped me to gain exposure and recognition for my project management and marketing skills. Now we are also dabbling in quality and have ventured into growing exotic varieties like pink bourbon and have started fermentation processes and also have our own brand of coffee that we want to market and continue to be pioneers in creating a coffee culture. What I mean by that is to teach people to drink better coffee, like just choice coffee." What can you think of at the moment that you'd like to improve on the farm? Well, in truth, there's still a lot of stuff that needs to be done on any farm. But in this case, we noticed that what we are currently lacking in quality improvement is an improvement in the washing process. It could be Ecomil, for example, which also reduces water contamination. We also need a small lab so that we can evaluate our lots ourselves and sort the coffee by quality and see where in the processing process we are not yet getting the results we would like. We want to be pioneers and have a demonstration/demonstration farm and grow the best choice coffees so that we have a client who will give us a fair price for our quality. In fact, at the moment we sell to the highest bidder, whether it is SKN Caribe Café or the coffee federation.

Projects and challenges

The biggest challenges the family faces are problems with financing the work on the farm. In order to continue to develop their projects, plant new varieties, or just keep the farm, house and family going, they have small consumer or agricultural loans. They have to pay these back regularly, especially from coffee sales. Similarly, because the farm is already quite large, they need to pay workers to maintain it and a number of pickers and pickers at harvest time. These funds need to be immediately available, and so it often happens that Ñañezos will sell coffee to the first buyer just to have the cash to pay their debts. In the world of picking, this is sometimes a hindrance; you don't have time to look around for a buyer who will give you maybe a little more... We try to keep in touch with them and find a solution to make everyone happy. When I was at the farm, I was talking to Mr Oliverio about the need to ensure that the drying room is refurbished as soon as possible, ideally investing in a new, more expensive roof so that the plastic sheeting currently used doesn't have to be replaced every year and a half. The investment could be easily quantified and will certainly not be a large sum, but it is a big financial burden for the family.

------------------

We roast 3 times a week, so your coffee always arrives freshly roasted. We have been roasting our own coffee since 2019 in Silůvky in southern Moravia.