We started with coffee. Not because we knew everything about it — because we wanted the first thing we handed anyone to be something real, something we could put a name to.
We chose three.
El Mirador is Edy Martínez's. She learned to grow coffee as an adult — as a girl she was taught something else. Twenty-two years later, this is her honey-processed Pink Bourbon lot, the most distinctive of the three. It's a limited release: once it's gone, it doesn't come back.
Torcaza is Ruberto Martínez's, at a farm called El Placer. Eight thousand trees of Castillo F4 and F11, worked with his wife and their three children.
“El café no es un trabajo. Es una forma de vida.”
“Coffee isn't a job. It's a way of life.”
That's his line, and it's the closest anyone has come to saying what we believe about RUTA2.
Panal. Santa Marta is a community lot — twenty-five small farms in Nariño. No single one of them grows enough for a lot of its own; ten sacks a year, each. Together they do. There's no star farm behind this coffee. There's a community.
We don't manufacture anything. We choose. And we choose by the same standard we chose this life by: you should know where something comes from, how it was made and who made it.
See all three coffees →