Colombia Washed Finca La Fortuna - Zenon Tacan Ceron (2020)

Zenon Tacan Ceron has five daughters, but only one, the oldest, Bettine, has followed in her father’s footsteps and become a coffee grower. Don Zenon and Bettine live and grow coffee at their finca La Fortuna, located in the municipality of Tangua, in the department of Nariño. La Fortuna spans a total surface area of five and half hectares, one of which is planted with the Castillo variety, approximately 5,000 trees. Bettine explained to us that her family has always cultivated coffee, but before it was “just for the household”, and other crops such as rye and corn, were their main forms of income. Today, besides coffee, Bettine and Zenon also raise quails and sell their eggs to several supermarkets in Nariño’s capital city of Pasto. In order to deliver the eggs, as well as their parchment coffee during the harvest season, Bettine takes a form of public transport common throughout rural Colombia called a chiva or bus escalera, which is a type of brightly painted, open-air (the windows do not have panes) bus. She leaves La Fortuna around 5:30 in the morning and arrives in the capital two hours later. This upcoming May, they have plans to plant an additional 5,800 coffee trees. Bettine’s son Eiver Juliano Obando, also lives with his mother and grandfather at the family farm and sometimes helps with farm chores.

La Fortuna sits at 1,800 m.a.s.l, in the vereda of Nascan. Tangua neighbors the municipality of Yacuanquer, another coffee-producing community where Azahar sources most of our Nariño coffees. Don Zenon, who is originally from the municipality of Córdoba, bought La Fortuna over 40 years ago. The landscape of the farm is varied, but mostly flat. The soil is predominantly loam with a few pockets of clay. The family recently planted banana trees alongside their coffee for shade. They fertilize their crops three times a year with their homemade organic compost. During the height of the harvest, Zenon hires up to seven local pickers, many of them neighbors, and pays them a day rate for every 40 kilos harvested, plus 500 pesos more per additional kilos collected. Father and daughter carry out the post-collection processing or beneficio, together. After the cherry is brought in from the field, they dump the harvest into a big tank and fill it with water in order to remove any green or damaged cherries. They then de-pulp in the early afternoon—the workday goes from seven in the morning to three in the afternoon—after which the beans are left to ferment overnight. The next morning, around eight or nine, the coffee is washed and put out to dry in parabolic dryers with three tiers of beds. The resulting cup is floral and juicy, with notes of lemongrass.