Producer: Nohora Sepulveda
Farm: Finca La Floresta
Region: Huila, Colombia
Process: 170 Hours Fermentation Natural
Varietal: Castillo, Colombia
Tastes Like: Dried Cranberries, Strawberries, Rose
This is a returning coffee! Nohora Sepulveda de Zambrano is 73 years-old and has
been around coffee her whole life. Today, she oversees production at her five-hectare farm, Finca La Floresta, which is in the hamlet of La Laguna, about 45 minutes from the municipal town center. While Doña Nohora has a permanent right-hand man in her farm manager Alexander, her two sons Edwin and Rafael, are also coffee growers, who learned everything they know about the family’s crop from her, and their late father Rafael Sr. They also work alongside their mother two to three days a week in addition to managing their own adjoining farms.
Besides coffee, the Sepulveda Zambrano family also grows plantains and yucca.
During the main harvest, which usually occurs in June and July in this part of Huila, Nohora employs up to 25 local pickers to carry out the cherry collection at all three family farms. Doña Nohora and Alexander carry out the post-collection processing while Edwin processes his own coffee, the family does share two wet-mills. For this natural process coffee—an eco-friendly that La Floresta is gaining recognition
for—the Castillo and Colombia cherries were hand-selected and put in bags to ferment intact for 170 hours, after which Nohora and Edwin washed the coffee and put it out to dry on raised beds inside a parabolic dryer for 5 days.
