Harvest Diaries: Huila

Selective picking means exactly what it says: only ripe cherries, picked one by one, which means a picker walks the same trees five to eight times per season. At Finca La Esperanza, pickers are paid by weight with a ripeness bonus — a system that costs the farm more and returns it in the cup.

We spent two weeks there during the main harvest, filling the baskets ourselves on day three, and I picked in two hours what Doña Elena picks in twenty minutes. The coffee that arrives at our roastery is not a commodity that fell off a tree; it is thousands of small skilled decisions made on steep hillsides.

The price table on our sourcing page is the shortest summary of this I can give. The full version is that you should visit a harvest once in your life, if only to recalibrate what the word “premium” means.