Sometimes the greatest art is doing something ordinary absolutely perfectly. Colombia Finca Tamana by Elias Roy and Bellanid Sanchez is exactly that kind of coffee. No experiments, no fermented wildness—just the Variedad Colombia variety, refined through patient work to bring out the very best it has to offer. In the cup, you’ll find caramel, milk chocolate, and subtle notes of ripe red fruit—all smooth and velvety. This coffee doesn’t need to shout to win you over. It’s enough that it tastes clean, sweet, and balanced from the first sip to the last.
Finca Tamana is a 57-hectare farm tucked away in the mountains between the towns of El Pital and La Plata in Colombia’s Huila region, one of the country’s finest coffee-growing areas. Elias Roa purchased it in 2011, when it had been abandoned for some time, and today he manages it together with his family. Among other varieties, the farm grows Variedad Colombia, which was bred in the late 1960s by the Colombian research institute Cenicafé as a resistant hybrid between the Caturra variety and the so-called Timor Hybrid, a natural cross between Arabica and Robusta. The goal was to achieve resistance to coffee rust, which had been plaguing traditional varieties for years, and over time, Variedad Colombia proved to be a more stable and flavor-balanced choice.
This coffee was processed using a washed method executed with meticulous attention to detail. The cherries are harvested by hired pickers under Elias’s supervision and then hand-sorted to ensure only the ripe ones are processed. They rest overnight in a hopper; in the morning, they are hulled and then fermented with the remaining pulp for 24 hours in stainless-steel tanks. Fermentation is stopped precisely when the pulp can be easily washed off, before anything negative has a chance to affect the flavor. This is followed by washing in an eco-mill, which reduces water consumption from the usual 50 to 100 liters to just half a liter to one liter per kilogram of coffee. After washing, the beans are soaked for another 24 hours, and any underdeveloped beans are removed. Drying then takes place in parabolic dryers and on beds under shade nets for about 20 to 30 days, until the moisture content drops below 11%. It is precisely this meticulous care that accounts for the clean and sweet character of the entire cup.
- Producer: Elias Roa & Bellanid Sanchez
- Harvest: May–June 2025