Colombia - Herbert Peñaloza's 575 Gesha

Brew Guide:

Best Brewed with: Filter

Lightest Roaster Influence: The post-harvest processing on this is pretty funky - so we're taking a light and bright approach to it. We found this coffee really benefited from a fast, energetic roast with a short finish - anything slower picked up the cacao nib character that some heavily processed naturals can catch; whereas this approach brings out a lot more lighter fruits.

Best Rested: 3-4 weeks

Filter: 64g/L & 93°C, with rest we like to move down to 90°C

Espresso: Turbo shots + 3 weeks rest. 18g/50g+ & 20s

We’re tasting: Sweet mixed tropical fruit aromatics - like tinned fruit salad, alongside blueberry, lemon and unrefined cacao butter. In the cup it's dense and process-forward- we're getting blueberry jam, ripe mango, lemon zest, caramelised peach and passionfruit, alongside a rich boozy note that reminds us of Pedro Ximénez sherry, with white chocolate and berry compote on cool.

Traceability

The Story

Herbert Peñaloza came to coffee from commercial photography. He co-founded LaREB (La Real Expedición Botánica) with Ana Mustafá in 2017, at a time when the C-price had fallen below the cost of production for most Colombian farmers. The organisation exists because of how coffee moves from farm to cup in Colombia, and it was built when that problem hit crisis point.

Colombian coffee production has been structured around the FNC (Federación Nacional de Cafeteros) since 1927. The Federation represents over 500,000 producers and operates a network of cooperatives with purchase points across the country, guaranteeing a base price tied to the C-market. Its logistics arm, Almacafé, handles dry milling, warehousing, quality control, customs, and transport to port, and a mandatory contribución cafetera is collected on every kilo of coffee exported. In parallel, private exporters operate their own channel, often backed by multinational trading houses who own or control the trilladoras where parchment is prepared for export. A producer typically grows and wet-processes on farm, then sells parchment to a cooperative or local buyer, and from there the coffee passes through the trilladora, the exporter, and the importer before reaching a roaster. At every stage someone takes a margin for the service they provide, and at every stage someone other than the producer is making decisions about how their coffee is graded, priced, and moved. The FNC would argue it exists to protect producers, and the guaranteed purchase price is a safety net, but it is also a vast institutional apparatus that absorbs resources and makes decisions on producers' behalf. When the C-price sat below the cost of production, that safety net wasn't enough. The C-price has been historically high over the past two years and producers are seeing the upside of that, but the structure still stands. Every intermediary still takes their cut. Quality assessment happens in consuming countries. Branding happens in English. Feedback rarely reaches the farm in any useful form.

Speciality coffee looks different on the surface. A roaster buys from a named importer who buys from a named exporter who buys from a named farm, and the relationships are real. But behind a significant number of those speciality importers sits a multinational trading house providing the working capital and logistics infrastructure that makes the operation possible. The importer a roaster deals with is often financed by or is a subsidiary of the same conglomerates that run the commodity pipeline. They provide the liquidity that allows speciality supply chains to function, and they take their cut for doing so. That dependency on large trading capital doesn't go away just because there's a farm name on the bag.

LaREB was built to tear that structure out. Herbert has described it as an agreement built on disagreements with the people who weren't representing Colombian producers properly, and he's been clear that it's not a trading company, not an exporter, not a centralised mill, and not an NGO. The collective owns its own dry mill, quality lab, and roastery, and its members handle every stage from quality assessment through to export logistics and direct sales to roasters. Critically, they don't rely on multinational finance to do it. Working capital comes directly from roaster partners who pre-finance harvests, cutting the trading houses out completely. The name itself is borrowed from an 18th century Colombian botanical expedition and is deliberately un-registerable, because no individual should be able to own it.

Herbert brands everything coming out of the collective in Spanish as a point of principle, a refusal to present Colombian coffee through the language of consuming countries. That financial and cultural independence is rare in Colombian speciality coffee, and it is what makes LaREB a different kind of exporter to almost any other a roaster will work with.

In that same year, Herbert purchased El Bocadillo, a plot in Casabianca at 1900 MASL with no road and no infrastructure. He and his team cut paths through the jungle with machetes, used mules and pulleys to move bags up the mountain, and spent years studying the native flora, soil composition, and microclimate before planting. The farm now grows 19 cultivars across 54 acres, with a significant portion set aside as protected rainforest and neighbouring farmland registered as a nature reserve called Agua de Dios to block mining interests threatening the region. El Bocadillo is also the base for CDNT (Caficultores Diferenciados del Norte del Tolima), a group founded by 8 north Tolima producers who combine production to produce LaREB's regional blend. Diego, who heads CDNT, identifies and brings in additional local producers beyond the founding membership, extending access to the collective's quality infrastructure and LAREB's export channels - when those lots exceed the regional blend quality standard, they are seperated out as microlots, and the higher export premium is returned to those producers.

El Bocadillo functions as LaREB's field laboratory, where Herbert tests processing methods and variety performance and feeds everything back to the wider group - so that his successes are the groups successes, and it's something that really shows in the overall quality of every LaREB lot, one of the reasons they've become one of our key Colombian suppliers.