La Maria 2017 - Colombia 2017 Verified listing

Region: La Mesa, Cundinamarca

Score: 90,78

Variety: Gesha

Process: Natural

Altitude: 1750 m.a.s.l.

Orlando is Agronomist, he provides technical assistance in different coffee farms. For many years, he and his wife had the desire to have their own farm but due to his busy working life, he never got the chance until he decided to rent a piece of land and grow his first 5.000 Gesha trees.

The first harvest was earlier this year and Orlando decided to compete with his first lot of Gesha getting support and advice from the company he works with. So he began to gather the amount of coffee required for the competition with a lot of effort as the amount for a natural process had to be bigger in order to meet the amount required for the competition.

When he realized that there was not a place to process his coffee, he rented another piece of land where he did a natural process to his Gesha cherries for the competition as there was no infrastructure to do a washed process. Orlando says that the biggest challenge was to achieve the quantity required for the competition. “To me getting the second place was like getting the first one as this was my first harvest, with my first lot of coffee and participating for the first time in this competition”.