Colectivo - Luis Marino Ortega

What a pleasure it is to enjoy Don Luis’s coffee again! Like all the lots under the Colectivo label, it comes from the San Agustin region in southern Colombia. 

Luis Marino Ortega has been harvesting coffee and avocados all his life. Today, he can draw on experience gained through the many challenges he has faced during his career as a producer. At just 16, he began his first harvests. Then, at 20, after spending two years in military service, he bought his first hectares of land and planted several thousand coffee trees. But despite all his experience, Luis struggled for many years to obtain a sufficient price for his coffee. After spending several decades selling his coffee as parchment on the local market, Luis began selling it to international buyers in exchange for a slightly higher price.

But it was only with the creation of the Monkaaba collective that he was able to start selling his coffee as micro-lots at much higher prices. Like the other lots that make up the Colectivo, we are very honored to present Luis Marino Ortega’s coffee to you. We owe this wonderful collaboration to our importing partner, Semilla Coffee.

Grown at an altitude of approximately 1,840 meters, this coffee is made up of the Pink Bourbon variety. The cherries are picked at full maturity and sorted first by flotation, then by hand, to remove cherries that are too ripe or not ripe enough. They are then placed in the mechanical pulper for 12 hours before being mechanically pulped and dry-fermented for 30 hours. Afterwards, the coffee is washed 3 to 5 times under running water to remove the remaining mucilage, before being slowly dried on raised beds for 18 days.