Tolima
Steep and high, and outside the specialty trade for decades because buyers couldn't get in. It arrived late with the quality intact.
- Country
- Colombia
- Typical elevation
- 1,500 to 2,000 masl
- Harvest
- Main crop April to June, secondary October to December
Tolima runs along the eastern flank of the Central cordillera, west of Bogotá. Altitude and slope here are as good as anywhere in Colombia.
The reason it took so long to show up in specialty catalogues isn't agronomic. Southern Tolima, around Planadas and Gaitania, was among the areas most affected by Colombia's armed conflict, and for decades buyers simply couldn't get in. Coffee kept being grown. It just got sold into the national pool with nobody's name on it.
Access opened up through the 2010s, and what came out was a department full of smallholders who had been farming high-altitude coffee the whole time without a specialty market to sell it into. Many of the early separated lots came through grower associations formed in that period, several of them by families returning to land they'd left.
Harvest here is inverted relative to much of Colombia, with the main crop arriving in the first half of the year. That timing alone makes Tolima useful to a roaster, because it lands when other Colombian origins are between harvests.
The reason it took so long to show up in specialty catalogues isn't agronomic. Southern Tolima, around Planadas and Gaitania, was among the areas most affected by Colombia's armed conflict, and for decades buyers simply couldn't get in. Coffee kept being grown. It just got sold into the national pool with nobody's name on it.
Access opened up through the 2010s, and what came out was a department full of smallholders who had been farming high-altitude coffee the whole time without a specialty market to sell it into. Many of the early separated lots came through grower associations formed in that period, several of them by families returning to land they'd left.
Harvest here is inverted relative to much of Colombia, with the main crop arriving in the first half of the year. That timing alone makes Tolima useful to a roaster, because it lands when other Colombian origins are between harvests.
