Benedicto Puentes
Benedicto Puentes is a farmer from the Tolima region and many of you need no introduction. Perhaps you were lucky enough to meet him in person in the fall of 2021, when he visited us in the Czech Republic together with his wife Helena Oliviero.
Benedicto is extremely active and always comes up with new projects. He plunged headlong into the world of specialty, improving the processes on his parents’ farm Palma Roja and gradually buying more land and starting his own plantations. Together with Helena, they also help local farmers get paid well for their coffee, assessing and advising on farm processes for next to nothing. It all started when he could no longer watch his neighbors have poor bargaining power simply because of a lack of information.
“Why am I doing this? I would like the whole region to benefit from this and our coffee to start to be recognized as well as the coffee from Huila, for example.”
And we, at Chicas Industry, hope to deepen and expand our cooperation, because we love Tolima!
COUNTRY
Colombia
REGION
China Alta, Tolima
FARM
Palma Roja
ALTITUDE
1760 m
SIZE OF THE FARM
3,5 ha (3 ha of coffee)
COFFEE VARIETIES
Castillo, Colombia
ABOUT THE FARM
The Palma Roja farm belongs to the Puentes Gonzáles family. It is relatively new, founded in 1995 by Benedicto Puentes Vásquez and Marghod González. It is their youngest son, Benedicto Júnior, who is our acquaintance and friend, and thanks to him and his Italian wife Helena, we started buying coffee from Tolima. The coffee trees on the Palma Roja farm are around 7 years old and grow mostly without shading. In this area, there is so much cloud cover during the year that additional shade would be harmful and would not allow the plants to develop. (Shading is used in areas where the light intensity during the year is above the average need of coffee plants.)
For the past few years, Benedicto and Helena have been working together to take local coffee production a step further. Benedicto processes his coffees very carefully. Sometimes he also buys ripe cherries from farmers in the area and shows people that quality, and therefore price, can be increased by good and precise handling.
This is a repetition of what we experience on other farms, for example in Rondón, Boyacá. If someone local is the change agent, this is the most direct way to achieve results. Especially if it’s someone people like and respect, like Benedicto.
ABOUT THE PROCESSES
Benedicto processes its coffees mainly using the washed method. But every year he works on longer and longer fermentations and looks for the ideal way to add juiciness to his coffees. Although the farm is located in a remote rural area with poor access to roads and services such as internet and mobile networks, Benedicto processes each lot according to strict standards. He controls the fermentation processes, their length and the temperature at which they take place, and to achieve the best stability of the grain, he uses gradual and long drying, keeping the temperature around 36 degrees. And the results it achieves are getting better every year.
Castillo, Colombia - washed, fermented (LOT CO-23-027)
Benedicto again prepared for us his juicy pleasant coffee, a blend of Castillo and Colombia varieties, which he processed as washed but with double fermentation. After harvesting, the ripe cherries were fermented for 50 hours, then de-skinned, followed by another fermentation for 100 hours in plastic bags. The coffee was then washed and dried on a rooftop dryer for 15 days.
LOT CO-23-098 Benedicto Puentes Colombia W
Benedicto again prepared for us his juicy pleasant coffee, a blend of Castillo and Colombia varieties, which he processed as washed but with double fermentation. After harvesting, the ripe cherries were fermented for 50 hours, then de-skinned, followed by another fermentation for 100 hours in plastic bags. The coffee was then washed and dried on a rooftop dryer for 15 days.
LOT CO-23-099 Benedicto Puentes Castillo W
Benedicto again prepared for us his juicy pleasant coffee, a blend of Castillo and Colombia varieties, which he processed as washed but with double fermentation. After harvesting, the ripe cherries were fermented for 50 hours, then de-skinned, followed by another fermentation for 100 hours in plastic bags. The coffee was then washed and dried on a rooftop dryer for 15 days.
LOT CO-23-100 Benedicto Puentes Castillo ferm. W
Benedicto again prepared for us his juicy pleasant coffee, a blend of Castillo and Colombia varieties, which he processed as washed but with double fermentation. After harvesting, the ripe cherries were fermented for 50 hours, then de-skinned, followed by another fermentation for 100 hours in plastic bags. The coffee was then washed and dried on a rooftop dryer for 15 days.
LOT CO-23-101 Benedicto Puentes Wush wush W
After harvesting, the ripe cherries were completely washed and cleaned of skin and pulp. The coffee was then fermented for 24 hours in plastic bags. The coffee is then washed again and moved to the roof drying room where it is dried for 15 days.
LOT CO-23-102 Benedicto Puentes Wush wush H
After harvesting, the ripe cherries were washed and depulped, but just the skin of the coffee so the juicy pulp stays for the honey process. Then the coffee was fermented in the plastic bags for 94 hours. Cherries are moved directly to the dryer. The coffee was dried on a rooftop dryer for 15 days
