Archers Colombia Aroma Nativo Castillo Coffee

The farm and producer

Luis Marcelino wholeheartedly diverged from the well-trodden path of a strategic, corporate achiever well-established in a world city to find his place in the world of coffee.

The yearning to own his time and spend more of his days nearer to nature came while he was living and working in Paris. His love for drinking specialty coffee and the circumstance of his wife having ties in Colombia led him to explore opportunities for a fresh start toward what he believed to be a more fulfilling life they could build from there.

Having been born and raised, and come of age, in the wine-growing highlands of his home country Portugal, he has always had an innate affinity for natural landscapes, a sense of wonder for the bounties of the land, and an inexhaustible curiosity about his part in making the big picture more beautiful.

From 2017 to 2019, he spent two years traveling between France and Colombia to learn first-hand about coffee cultivation, processing, and the export/import trade. As he connected with a few farmers and seasoned producers, his interest in coffee genetics and the intricacies of processing flourished too.

Taking inspiration from Ninety Plus in Panama, he pitched the idea of venturing into natural and experimental processing to a partner, who was then only producing traditional, washed coffees according to the nationally sanctioned norm. After intentional and thoroughly documented experiments with small batches, he drew up the first non-traditional protocols that formed the foundations of his company, Aroma Nativo, established in 2019.

The cherries in this lot are the fruits of the hard work and dedication of a collective of coffee farmers who are part of the Veci Project. They are Miguel Castillo, Ezequiel Guzmán, Gerson Hidalgo, Juanito Salinas, José Granado, and Teodiselo Delgado.

Aroma Nativo began with a processing hub based in Huila, Colombia, and a trading company headquartered in Paris, France. With the 2022 acquisition of a five-hectare farmland dedicated to cultivating rare coffee varieties that will be processed towards 90+ levels, Luis is boosting his stake in the arena of competition coffees. This comes on the heels of Aroma Nativo lots having been showcased by several coffee champions on their respective national stages — Portugal, Italy, Austria, and Sweden — and also represented in the world arena.

About Veci Project

In 2022, Luis implemented the Veci Project, having realized the extent to which purposeful processing could contribute to improving coffee quality and enable coffee farmers to enjoy a better quality of life when they get higher returns for their harvests.

He chose the name veci, shorthand for the colloquial vecino meaning neighbor, because it reflects the spirit of solidarity among the community of farmers the project seeks to serve.

Essentially, the project provides a viable alternative for coffee farmers with commendable agronomic practices to receive advance payments that aid their cash flow and also earn a premium for high-quality cherries suitable for expressing the in-demand flavor profiles sought by Aroma Nativo’s global network of renowned roasters.

The Veci Project is also instrumental for Luis to effectuate his passion for sustainably contributing to uplifting the vecis’ lives through education. Since the majority of them have not yet been initiated into the contemporary methods and consequent benefits of specialty coffee, they are still most comfortable with the notion of selling their coffees to conventional processing stations to be washed and marketed primarily as commercial-grade products.

To shift their mindset, Luis and his team at origin devote resources to conduct workshops covering a vast range of subjects from cultivation to post-harvest processing. Topics include: identifying coffee varieties, increasing shade cover in their farms, selective picking, and fermenting and drying their own cherries — all with the aim of improving quality and the potential to garner a higher cup score.

Conscious of the youth’s declining interest in coffee farming in the blessed terroir of Huila, Veci Project puts a priority on seeking out and speaking to the new generation of coffee farmers and producers. The core of their conversations is that doing a proper job with coffee — from cultivation and harvesting to processing — presents them with better opportunities to thrive at home, where they are, than the seeming attraction of migrating to larger cities, where they might not be as equipped to make it.

The coffee and the process

The Castillo coffee variety, introduced by Colombia's national coffee research institute, Cenicafe, in 2005, was developed as an improvement over earlier cultivars like Colombia/F6 and Tabi, with a focus on resilience, productivity, and cup quality. Initially, there were concerns about its cupping potential compared to older varieties like Caturra, but innovative producers embarked on post-harvest processing experiments to demonstrate that Castillo could deliver exceptional cup quality.

Traditionally washed, it was observed to have a dominant chocolatey and cherry-like cup profile with hints of citrus. Meanwhile, natural-processed, some complexity can emerge, adding nuances of dark chocolate, caramel, and even spices or surprising tropicality to the cup.

In Aroma Nativo, Luis's implementation of the natural process revealed the tropical nuance of tamarind amid the dark fruit and chocolate-dominant cup character.

Innovative processing protocols like this have not only increased awareness among Colombian coffee farmers about the potential of disease-resistant varieties like Castillo, but they have also opened a multitude of avenues for creating diverse flavor profiles. This allows farmers to be better rewarded for their hard work, as their coffees can now more strongly compete in the specialty coffee market and command the higher-end of premium prices.