Colombia - La Soledad #9 - Ají [25/26]

Brew Guide:

Best Brewed with: Filter

Lightest Roaster Influence: Well processed & dried, nice and dense, trad washed - to really amplify that acidity and aromatic structure, we're doing a super fast roast, with a touch longer development & lower end temperature. 

Best Rested: 4+ weeks

Filter: 62g/L & 96°C, with rest we like to move down to 92°C

Espresso: Turbos - 18g to 48g in 22-26s. Excellent soup

We’re tasting: Rich red-fruit aromatics - we're finding plum, raspberry, cherry & grapefruit zest. In the cup it's dense & syrupy, reminding us of Kenyan coffee - rhubarb, redcurrant and ripe persimmon while warm, with a honeycomb sweetness and sparkling acidity. As it cools we get a sweet ruby grapefruit note with brown sugar, black tea & hibiscus.

Traceability:

The Story

Finca La Soledad is a 22-hectare farm in Acevedo, in the southern reaches of Huila where the Central and Eastern Andes converge above the upper Magdalena Valley. The Gómez family has been farming here since the 1960s, and Mario Fernando Gómez Urquina (a fourth-generation producer) now operates the property alongside his brothers Diego and William on adjacent land. For decades the farm produced conventional washed Caturra and Variedad Colombia, the cultivars that carried Colombian coffee through most of the late twentieth century, and was recognised as a Cup of Excellence finalist in 2009 on the strength of that traditional work alone.

The farm looks quite different now. Around 2019, Mario and his father began planting "exotic" cultivars alongside the existing stock, and the current count sits at upwards of fifteen documented varieties including several Ethiopian landrace accessions. Mario had already founded Kawa Comercio Sostenible in 2014, a BIC-designated export company based in nearby Pitalito working with over 200 independent producers across six departments, so the infrastructure to identify and respond to shifting buyer interest was already there. When roasters started paying more for "rare" cultivars, the farm planted them. When high technical intervention processing took off, they built the capacity for that too. We see a pattern - a well resourced farmer, with the ability to see the trends in the consuming market in the global north able to take on the risk with deliberate, considered repositioning toward the vociferous (and oft capricious) demands of specialty market. 

The traditional washed production, though, has not been left behind. Farms moving into high intervention work often let their conventional lots slide - this is an awful generalisation to make, but when the crazy lots can command such a high premium, there is less impetus on needing to perfectly execute the traditional stuff. Mario still produces clean, carefully executed washed coffees, and this lot is one of them - which also goes to show that the base material for high intervention coffees is super important.

Ají is an Ethiopian landrace accession, not the Bourbon derivative its name ("Bourbon Ají") once implied. It was discovered by José Herman Salazar at Finca La Guaca in Pitalito, Huila, named for the floral/chilli-esq smell the cherries gave off during harvest, José's Ají placed sixth at the 2020 Colombia Cup of Excellence, prompting the Alliance for Coffee Excellence to commission genetic testing from RD2 Vision - the very same lab where we recently confirmed the lineage of Fragancia, and that the tree growing in our cafe is SL9.

The result placed Ají firmly outside the Bourbon-Typica domestication lineage and, notably, outside any known accession held at CATIE's international germplasm collection in Costa Rica or Cenicafé's Colombian Coffee Collection. Chiroso and Rosado share the same evidentiary gap: all three have been genetically confirmed as Ethiopian landraces, but none can be traced to a specific accession in any institutional collection, and no chain of custody connecting them to the germplasm pipeline has ever been documented. 

Between 1964 and 1966, two major scientific expeditions (one led by the FAO, the other by the French research body ORSTOM) collected hundreds of wild and semi-wild Coffea arabica accessions from Ethiopia's southwestern highlands. That material was distributed to gene banks across the tropics, with the CATIE collection in Costa Rica and the IFCC station in Cameroon serving as the primary relay points for the Americas. Cenicafé imported duplicates from both sources from the late 1960s onwards, building a living field collection of 393 characterised Ethiopian accessions at its Naranjal experimental station in Caldas. The intended purpose was pre-breeding research, principally screening for rust resistance genes to feed into the Timor Hybrid crossing programmes that produced Variedad Colombia, Castillo and their successors.

The Ethiopian accessions were never formally released to farmers. Yet they clearly escaped institutional custody, most likely through informal channels: trial plantings on cooperating farms, seed taken by station workers, material shared by extension agents, or simple mislabelling during nursery propagation. The Colombian Agricultural Institute (ICA), which ran plant breeding and germplasm programmes nationally from the 1960s, was dismantled in the early 1990s when the government split its research functions into a new body, Corpoica (now Agrosavia), which then saw its public funding dramatically cut between 2000 and 2010.

Parallel to that institutional upheaval, the five-decade armed conflict displaced millions and left entire coffee-growing departments inaccessible for years, with farms abandoned and whatever was growing on them persisting unattended, and the FNC's extension service unable to operate in conflict zones. There's no specific documented link from Ethiopian coffee germplasm to an abandoned research plot/shuttered stations, but the conditions were precisely those in which unusual accessions could circulate, persist, and lose their paper trail entirely. Once on a single farm through any of these pathways, the self-pollinating nature of C. arabica allowed these landraces to breed true through conventional seed saving, and farmer-to-farmer exchange did the rest.

Genetic testing driven by RD2 Vision and by the Cup of Excellence's systematic DNA fingerprinting of competition winners since 2021 has begun to reveal what was there all along, and further testing across Colombia's more isolated growing communities will almost certainly continue to surface additional Ethiopian landraces with no documented provenance, each one a fragment of mid-century germplasm distribution whose full history may never be recoverable.