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It started when I was 5 years old, asking my mom to make my mug of hot milk with a splash of coffee and lots of sugar.  This was my attempt to be more like the adults of my family who drank their coffee religiously…and black.  It was in my blood.  My grandfather, a life long coffee farmer, met my grandmother on the coffee farm he worked at…she was the farmer’s daughter.  Sounds like one of the Latin soap operas or “novelas” you see on Univision, but let’s fast forward past the 16 kids they had together, past my parent’s incredible journey from Colombia to the USA,  and here I am, taking it back to where it all began – the coffee farm.

Several years ago after trying some delicious coffee from a cousin’s farm (San Carlos), I began to question where he was selling his coffee and why he wasn’t exporting it.  As it turns out, the Coffee Federation of Colombia (Federacion Nacional de Cafeteros), who oversees any and all exportation of coffee out of Colombia, makes it difficult for a small producing farm to export its coffee.  Instead, farmers sell their coffee to the Federation’s co-ops which are strategically placed throughout the country, and basically lump all of the coffees from the various farms together.  My cousin’s specialty coffee, along with hundreds of other farmer’s specialty coffees, get lost in the shuffle, mixed with mediocre coffees (and even bad coffees), completely losing their unique and special characteristics.  The coffee is then, for the most part, exported to industry giants such as Starbucks, Nestle, and Maxwell House.

This is when I began to wonder; could exporting the coffee directly from the farm be as difficult as everyone makes it out to be?  The answer is YES! But I don’t want to bore you with all of the details of the exportation process. I’ll do that in a future blog post.

Fast forward (again) three years, past the countless hours of research, hundreds of phone calls, emails, and personal visits to Colombia, and here we are, Campesino Specialty Coffee, bringing you these high quality, specialty coffees directly from our farms in Colombia.

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