09/28/2023
It's Blazing Arrow Week! We are here to talk about the two components in this blend, as we don't put untraceable, cheaper "blenders" in our blends.
First up is Jose Miller Gutierrez. He is part of a project we have spent years working on in Planadas, Tolima, Colombia that more or less redefined our stance on coffee buying. He is part of a wonderful Fair Trade Organic Association called ASOPAP. FTO is good because it does well by the planet and also provides a bottom floor for how cheap someone can undercut a producer. However, it can be bad for the same reasons - people potentially only focus on the bare minimum, leading to a loss in quality and thus a lacking imagination for actual high premiums paid to growers.
When one visits the farms in this area, they'll see high elevation, crisp microclimates, beautiful varieties, and great processing methods. Everything you need for a high scoring and high price point coffee. Yet, identifying, separating, and negotiating for these microlots is a lot of work that relies heavily on a healthy and well-intentioned supply chain. It requires producers to trust roasters and importers to communicate with exporters.
Most of our time visiting FTO organizations leads to rejecting these proposals, for very valid reasons, leading to them sticking with a bottom floor mentality. At Unity, we have spent years trying to identify communities looking to do the opposite.
Luckily, Jose Miller and the crew at ASOPAP are part of the forward-thinking generation that want to break through the ceiling of what a producer can make. Lots of credit to our importing partner, Cereza Coffee, for not only bringing us to visit ASOPAP for this year's harvest, but also for spending nearly half a decade negotiating and developing this project with us.
This harvest, after travelling to the remote and utterly beautiful Planadas, Tolima, we were able to secure Jose's full lot that has consistently cupped 88 points for us. We taste purple passion fruit, pink guava, & ripe blueberry.
