Cranberry, Toffee, Jasmine

Region | Salento
Altitude | 1900 MASL
Process | Washed
Variety | Tabi

This coffee is our first foray into a very exciting project, our friends at Belco have been pioneering - Coffee By Sail!

As we were working towards our B Corp certification, our team were astonished to find out that the vast majority of emissions associated with roasting and selling coffee come at the farm and transport level. All the work we had been doing to improve our impact at a local level to that point was shown in perspective: it turns out responsible sourcing is the most impactful way for a coffee roaster to control their impact on the planet.

Belco, based in France and our partner for many years, have been grappling with the same issue on their sustainability journey and have come up with an innovative solution to sharply reduce transport emissions: sending coffee containers to Europe on specially designed ships powered by sails instead of oil.

Luckily, they were able to source some super-tasty coffees to launch this project and our favourite among these was from the farm Tierra Linda in Quindío, Colombia. 

This farm is owned by Alfredo Gutríerrez and has coffee grown in the shade of guama, plantain and banana trees. The coffee is picked by hand according to ripeness. It is then pulped, sorted by flotation two or three times and fermented in tanks for twelve hours. It is finally washed and laid out in drying tunnels under the sun where it is regularly rotated for even drying.

The tides are certainly turning...