Our Three Pillars Blend is our classic blend for drip coffee, incorporating coffees from three different Latin American countries. For Three Pillars, we source from smallholder producers in Guatemala, Honduras, and Colombia.
The first coffee component comes from Corquin, Honduras. Produced by CAFICO, Cafes Finos de Corquin, Walter and Sergio Romero (4th generation coffee producers) support over 200 coffee producers in the Corquin region with technical assistance, environmental and sustainability certifications, processing, and export. CAFICO is a community leader of social responsibility projects for the local school and hospital.
The second coffee, from Antigua, Guatemala, was processed at the historic Pastores mill, which was built in the late 1800s. Although originally built to process wheat, Pastores has gone through several ownership changes over the last century and is now a major coffee processing mill. Pastores receives between 8,000 to 10,000 bags of coffee from farmers each year. Farmers contribute only their highest quality coffee, which is all hand-picked and brought to the mill to be depulped, fermented, washed, and sundried. Pastores recently overhauled their wet mill to use less water in the aquapulpers and installed a water purification and biodigester system.
The third coffee comes from various smallholder producers in the Huila and Caldas regions of Colombia. Each smallholder producer's farm is under 1 hectare of land, of the Caturra, Castillo, or Colombia variety between 1500-1750 MASL. Each producer washes, pulps, and ferments coffee on the farm for about 24-48 hrs. Parchment coffee is dried on covered patios for over 15 days, depending on the weather. Parchment coffee is then transported to the dry mill for processing and export. Our export partners work with various regional communities to source the quality we are looking for.
Each of the three coffee components in this blend represents the hard work and dedication of numerous small coffee producers in Latin America. We are proud to showcase their work in our Three Pillars Blend, which stands to uphold three essential pillars of sustainability: social, economic, and environmental.