The Pink Bourbon cherries travel down the mountain to Jamaica, where the RM Colombia team constructed a drying facility. The station sits several hundred metres downhill from the producers, making good use of the higher temperatures closer to sea level, which ensure a consistent drying environment for coffee.

Selling cherry, as opposed to processing coffee into parchment, is still contrary to the norm in such a large producing country like Colombia. Though different from traditional production, the end result is less labour intensive and more profitable for the producers. There is less need to maintain costly equipment, and all of the pulping, processing, and drying is completed by the team at Jamaica. These inputs return high cup quality, which in turn produce higher profitability for those who grew the coffee.

Villamaría's structure allows for a lot of diversification. The producers now have a wide-ranging portfolio of coffees from their harvests, providing varying avenues for additional profit returns for producers; one the ultimate goals of us here at Raw Material.

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Villamaría’s range is now joined by two new Pink Bourbon decaf microlots; Nimbus and Cirrus.

The Pink Bourbon seedlings were grown at our farm El Fénix, Quindío, and distributed to the producers of Villamaría for a nominal price; covering just the cost of the polybags the seedlings grew in, and labour at the nursery.

The resulting fruits of their cultivation are these two lots, processed as natural (Nimbus) and washed (Cirrus) anoxic microlots.

These lots were processed using the Water Pillow technique, which makes beautifully fruit-forward, and complex cups. Paired with gentle decaffeination at neighbouring Descafecol…

… these are two of the most delicious and lowest carbon footprint decafs around.

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