Avelino and the Blue Barrels

Posted on by Diana Johnston Ledezma

Finca El Guadual, remonta washed coffee, and two timelines from one small farm

On the drive out from Santuario towards Vereda La Linda, the road wound away from town and back into the green, and somewhere along it the coffees began to feel less like bowls on a table and more like part of a place.

By then, I had already met Avelino, but only briefly, back in the cupping lab the day before. We had spent the day moving between tables, breaking for food, drifting back in to taste a little more, and at some point, somewhere in the middle or towards the end of all that, he came in. I think he had been in town dropping off coffee, which would make sense. It is a long drive in from La Linda, so a trip into Santuario is never just one thing. Someone introduced him and said, almost casually, that this was Avelino, the producer behind the coffees I had kept returning to.

I asked a little about them and got the simplest version first: same producer, same farm, same process, but one had fermented longer than the other. We did not go much further than that. Everyone was tired, I was a bit shy, and we were going to see his farm the next day anyway.

So when we headed out the following morning, I was carrying those coffees with me. I already knew how they had felt in the cup, one bright and lifted, the other deeper and more cola-like, and I already knew they had come from the same hands. What I did not know yet was what kind of place had made them, or how that difference had been shaped.

There was a stream on the way out, running through all that green, and it pulled me back to what we had been told in Santuario about Tatamá: a place of water, mountains, protected land, and coffee. Santuario had already been described to us as La Perla de Tatamá, but on that road the phrase stopped sounding like background information and became the actual panaramic view from the back of the truck.

The coffees stop being cups on a table or numbers on a sample list and become part of a physical world. They belong to a road, a stream, a hillside, a small farm in Vereda La Linda, blue barrels, roof drying, changing weather, cherry selection, and one person doing the work himself. Also, as it turned out, a dog called Chiki, who seemed fairly convinced the whole operation belonged to him.

Finca El Guadual

Finca El Guadual is a small farm in Vereda La Linda, in Santuario. It is only around a hectare, which changes the feel of the whole visit. This is not a big estate story. It is one person, one small piece of land, and a process built through repetition, attention, and knowing the coffee very closely.

Avelino does it all himself. That becomes obvious very quickly when you are there. The farm does not feel separated into neat categories of picking, processing, and drying with different people attached to each part. It feels held together by one person moving through all of it, making decisions as the day asks for them.

His daughter was there too, following him around in that very particular way children do when someone is clearly their hero. It was charming to watch, but it also stayed with me because it made the whole place feel less like a process description and more like a living inheritance. Finca El Guadual was not only Avelino’s work in the present. It also carried a quiet sense of future.

That is one of the things I loved about visiting. You can talk about fermentation days, barrels, and process names from a distance, but standing there on the farm makes it much more human. The numbers are not floating around on a spec sheet. They belong to someone’s daily decisions: what is ripe today, what can be picked, what goes into the barrel, how the weather is behaving, how the coffee is developing, and when it needs to move.

How the lot takes shape

One of the things that became clearer on the farm was that these coffees do not begin with a fermentation number. They begin with Avelino deciding what is actually ready to be picked.

Across his small farm, he is working with three varieties, Colombia, Caturra, and Supremo, and he gathers the coffee in small amounts as the cherry reaches the right level of maturation. That matters here because these coffees are not built from one giant, static batch that gets sealed away and left alone. They take shape over time, as ripe cherry comes in and the lot is built in stages.

Once picked, the coffee gets a short fermentation in cherry, usually 12 to 24 hours depending on maturation, before it is pulped and moved into the sealed blue barrels for anaerobic remonta fermentation. Those barrels are now part of the visual world of this release for a reason. They are where the same farm, same producer, and same process begin to separate into different expressions.

During the remonta fermentation, the barrels are rotated every 24 hours. That rotation moves the coffee’s own mucilage-rich fermenting liquid back through the lot as it develops. It is one of the details that helps explain why these coffees have fermentation character without feeling like fermentation has swallowed the cup whole. There is movement through the process, but there is also control.

Because the lots are built from small daily collections, the coffee pulped first can reach around 15, 17, or 18 days of fermentation, while the last coffee pulped may reach around 9 or 10 days. After fermentation, Avelino washes the coffee using the lavador before it moves to drying.

On paper, that could sound messy. Standing on the farm, it felt like the opposite. What became obvious very quickly was that Avelino is not throwing time at the coffee and hoping for the best. He has standardised what he does through repetition and close attention, and the result is a process that feels held rather than improvised. That matters, because long fermentation does not automatically mean good coffee, and it definitely does not automatically mean clean coffee. What makes these cups work is not the numbers on their own, but the fact that the process is being guided by someone who knows exactly what he is looking for.

For the release, the two expressions we selected became the 10 day and 19 day lots, with the named day marking the longest point in each one. Same producer, same farm, same remonta washed process, with time as the variable.

Roof drying and the reality of Santuario

After washing, the coffee is dried on the roof for around 8 days.

This is another part of the story that feels important because drying is never just a neat line in a process description. In Santuario, weather is part of the reality. Rain can move in, conditions can shift, and small producers have to work with the infrastructure they actually have.

Avelino dries on the roof, adapting around the weather and protecting the coffee via a very cool roof rolling system when needed. The roof is place tracks with wheels, so that it can be brought over the coffee to protect it during pour downs. That kind of detail is not always glamorous, but it is part of what makes the coffee real. The process is not happening in a perfectly controlled fantasy lab. It is happening on a small farm, with one person doing the work, making decisions, responding to the place around him.

That is also why I find the cleanliness of these coffees so impressive. They are fermented, yes. They are expressive, yes. But they are not wild for the sake of being wild. They still feel washed. They still have structure. The fermentation adds sweetness, movement, depth, and personality, but the cups stay clear enough that you can taste the difference between the 10 day and the 19 day without everything becoming one big funky blur.

Chiki, obviously

And then there was Chiki.

I cannot really talk about visiting Finca El Guadual without mentioning the dog, because of course the dog becomes part of the story. Some details are technically important, like fermentation times and drying days. Some details are emotionally important, like the fact that there was a dog there making the whole farm feel even more alive.

Chiki does not explain the cup profile, but Chiki absolutely belongs in the memory of the coffee. That is how origin visits work for me. The technical information matters, but so do the things that fix the place in your mind: the colour of the barrels, the roof where the coffee dries, the sound of the road, the person explaining their process, the dog walking through the scene as if it owns the entire operation.

In a way, those details are part of why I wanted these coffees for Roastersaurus. The release is not only about an interesting fermentation comparison. It is about a small farm that felt vivid enough to build a world around.

Why the pair matters

What makes this release so interesting to me is that the two coffees are not opposites from different worlds. They are two expressions of the same starting point: the same producer, the same farm, the same remonta washed process, with fermentation time as the variable.

That makes them one of the clearest paired tastings I have released through Roastersaurus. The comparison is not about deciding which coffee is better. It is about tasting what time changed.

The 10 day is the faster side of the barrel. It is bright, juicy, lifted, and Raptor-like. The 19 day is the heavier side of the barrel. It has more depth, more pull, more cola-like sweetness, and that T-Rex sense of gravity. Both are clean. Both are fruit-forward. Both still feel connected to the same producer and process.

At London Coffee Festival, it was really lovely watching people taste them side by side. The T-Rex 19 seemed to just about steal the tiny crown for a lot of people, especially as espresso with milk, where that deeper cola sweetness really held its shape. The Raptor 10 had its own kind of magic too, and because it was the smaller lot, it disappeared first.

That is the reality of small releases. Sometimes the brighter side of the story vanishes before the deeper one, and the comparison becomes something you were lucky enough to catch in the moment. The T-Rex 19 is still here for now, carrying the heavier side of the barrel a little longer.

Order Avelino 19 here, while supplies last.

Before I met Avelino

Posted on by Diana Johnston Ledezma

Two coffees on a blind table in Santuario

I met these coffees before I met Avelino.

That feels like the right place to start, because the whole release began with taste before it had a name, a farm, a face, or a story attached to it. I was in Santuario, Colombia, cupping coffees from the region after travelling there with Raw Material, and at that point I was just following the table. No producer reveal, no card idea fully formed, no neat little narrative handed over with the samples. Just bowls, spoons, and the question I always come back to with Roastersaurus: is there something here that can become part of the world?

I never wrote one big blog about my Colombia trip, partly because the trip was too full to flatten into one neat travel post. Instead, I think the story is going to come out through the coffees themselves. Each release opens a different part of the trip, and this one starts in Santuario, before I met Avelino.

This trip was not only about buying coffee. It was about understanding where these coffees come from, how they are being produced, and what kind of stories are sitting behind them before they ever land in the UK. I was also wearing more than one hat. Saint Espresso and Roastersaurus are different brands with different needs, and I do not choose coffees for them in the same way. Saint has its own structure, tone, and customer base. Roastersaurus gives me another kind of freedom: to follow curiosity, character, strangeness, play, and those sensory moments that feel like they could turn into a creature.

That does not always mean choosing the loudest coffee on the table. It does not mean chasing the wildest fermentation, the most expensive variety, or the cup that shouts the hardest. Sometimes the right coffee is the one that keeps making you go back to it because there is something there: a shape, a movement, a feeling, a little hook in the cup.

Santuario had that feeling.

La Perla de Tatamá

Santuario is known as La Perla de Tatamá, and once you start hearing the story of the place, that name begins to make sense. The municipality sits in the influence of Tatamá National Natural Park, a protected area of around 48,000 hectares that stretches across three departments. Tatamá was described to us as a kind of green lung for the region, connected to the waters that feed towards both the Atlantic and the Pacific.

Coffee is not a small side detail in Santuario. It is the main economy of the municipality, with around 5,800 hectares planted in coffee, and Santuario is one of the major coffee-producing municipalities in the department. Most of the municipality is rural, and that matters because coffee here is not separate from daily life. The town, the surrounding farms, the association, the café, the buying station, the conversations, they all sit together.

That wider context helped me understand why Asocafé Tatamá exists in the way it does. Their logo itself pays homage to the park, with the mountains behind it and an endemic frog holding coffee beans. I loved that detail because it says a lot about what the association is trying to hold together: environmental sustainability on one side, and economic sustainability for coffee-producing families on the other.

That balance became one of the threads of the visit. Santuario is beautiful, but this is not a postcard story. It is a coffee town, inside a protected landscape, trying to build something that allows small producers to create more value from the coffee they grow.

Asocafé Tatamá

Asocafé Tatamá began in 2012, partly as a response to the difficulties producers were facing in the coffee sector: low prices, uncertainty in agriculture, and the feeling that coffee was not always working as a profitable industry for the families producing it.

At first, from around 2012 to 2015, the association was focused more on projects that could bring direct support to producers on farm. But the lesson they described was very clear: direct help on its own was not enough to solve the deeper problem. If producers were going to build a more dignified and sustainable life through coffee, the answer had to involve added value and fairer payment for the coffee itself.

So the association started shifting into something more commercial and quality-focused. They built out collection, a basic cupping lab, training, and a structure that could help producers understand coffee beyond the farm gate: processing, cupping, quality, and commercialisation. In 2016, they began collecting coffee and operating with a basic cupping laboratory. Around 2017 to 2018, their relationship with Raw Material helped consolidate larger-volume direct sales and a more stable commercial route.

That matters because the coffees I tasted in Santuario were not sitting on a random table. They were part of a local structure that has been built, step by step, to help producers access feedback, quality assessment, and better routes to market.

A café owned by producers

One of the parts I loved most was the café in town.

Asocafé Tatamá began exploring roasting in 2019, partly because there was not really a local option for producers to roast their own coffee in the municipality. Many producers were used to drinking commercial coffee brands, rather than being able to roast and drink the coffee they had grown themselves.

So the association started roasting. They began with around 500 pounds of coffee, and now roast significantly more for the local market. That step alone feels important, because it gives producers a chance to taste their own work as a finished product, not only as parchment that leaves the farm.

Then they went further and opened a café in Santuario, around 2021 to 2022, with the support of the local government. The idea was to create a coffee shop owned by producers, where the town could taste the best coffees being produced around them.

That is a bigger thing than it sounds.

For people on the consuming side of specialty coffee, tasting origin coffees in a café can feel normal. For producers, especially smallholders, that is not always the case. The coffee can leave the farm as parchment and become something else somewhere far away, tasted by people the producer may never meet. In Santuario, that loop becomes a little shorter. The coffee comes back into the cup, in the town where it was grown.

I had also been asked to bring a coffee from another country, so I brought Basha Bekele from Ethiopia, one of my Roastersaurus releases. It was brewed in the café, and local customers, producers, and producer families tasted it. There was something very special about that: an Ethiopian coffee from my world being tasted in a Colombian coffee town, by people whose own coffees were also being tasted and shared in that same space.

That is exactly the kind of exchange that makes coffee feel bigger than buying and selling. It becomes a way of expanding reference points, sharing quality, and letting people taste beyond the borders of their own production.

Building the value chain locally

The association has kept building from there. They have moved into small-lot export, helping coffees from the region reach clients in different parts of the world, especially where smaller lots and microlots need a more direct route. They have exported containers, but their strength seems to sit especially in smaller lots, the kind of coffees that can be difficult to move through more conventional structures.

They are also investing in more infrastructure: dry milling, roasting, and a fuller processing line that can keep more of the value chain connected to Santuario. I do not want this blog to become a machinery catalogue, but it matters because it shows the direction of travel. This is not an association sitting still. It is trying to build a fuller ecosystem around coffee: collection, quality control, roasting, café culture, export, and now more infrastructure to support that growth.

That was the world around the table when I cupped Avelino’s coffees.

Back on the sample roaster

After visiting the space and seeing more of how the buying station works, we were given a group of green samples to roast and cup. This was also a little personal joy for me, because before Saint and before Roastersaurus, I spent almost five years working in green coffee. A big part of my job was tasting and evaluating coffees, and another big part was roasting those coffees so they could be assessed properly.

So being handed samples in Santuario and getting to sample roast again felt like stepping back into an old rhythm, but in a completely different setting.

Most of the other roasters I was with had not sample roasted on a small sample barrel roaster before, so I got to show them how I approach that style of sample roasting while we roasted through the coffees for the table. It was one of those small trip moments that probably sounds very simple from the outside, but felt genuinely fun: a bit of practical knowledge, a bit of shared curiosity, and the build-up before everyone gets their spoons into the bowls.

Then we cupped.

There were a lot of coffees on the table, and of course there were several that people liked. That is always the strange little social theatre of sourcing: everyone quietly finding what they love, hoping no one else has fallen in love with the exact same thing, trying to work out what is possible, what is available, and what makes sense.

For Roastersaurus, I also had another thought in mind. I did not want to split a microlot if I could avoid it. I wanted to bring back something that would be unique to my customers, something that would not simply appear in several other places at the same time. That meant I did not necessarily chase every coffee that scored well or attracted attention. I was looking for the ones that felt right, and that I could actually keep whole for this release.

Two coffees kept pulling me back.

One was bright, juicy, fresh, and full of energy. It had this red fruit brightness, a clean lift, and a kind of speed in the cup that immediately made me think Raptor. The other was still fruity, but deeper. More cola-like, more pulled into sweetness, with something darker and more grounded. That one felt like it was moving toward T-Rex.

At the time, I did not know they were connected. I only knew I wanted both.

The reveal

The reveal

When I asked about the coffees, the whole thing suddenly became much more interesting.

Both were from the same producer: Avelino Mena. They came from the same farm, through the same remonta washed process, but they did not feel the same in the cup. The difference was time.

At that moment, the cards did not exist yet. The mirror artwork did not exist yet. The Raptor and the T-Rex were only just starting to form in my head from the way the coffees moved on the table.

That is one of my favourite parts of Roastersaurus. The dinosaurs are not assigned afterwards as decoration. They have to come from the coffee. The class, the stats, the skill, the artwork, all of it needs to make sense from what is happening in the cup and from the story around it.

At that stage, all I really knew was that I had found two coffees I could not leave behind.

The rest came later, at Avelino’s farm.