Description
La Cabaña - Yellow Pacamara
La Cabaña is in Bruselas, the upper part of Pitalito, where access is already difficult and the mountain sets its own pace. At 1,700 metres the fruit ripens slowly, without hurry, and you can taste it in the cup.
The farm is an inheritance. William Ortiz and his brother received it with conventional varieties, like almost everything in the area. In 2016 they decided that this was not enough. They trained, cupped, asked questions. They gradually pulled out the usual plants and planted what interested them — Bourbon Rosado, Ombligón, Pacamara, Bourbon Amarillo. Today 90% of the farm is exotic varieties. It was neither quick nor easy, but the direction never changed.
William Ortiz
William grew up on the farm. That is not a figure of speech: from a young age, work in the field was part of his daily life. What changed over the years was his outlook — he stopped seeing coffee as a crop and started seeing it as a process. Fermentations, varieties, ripening times, control of processing. A method he built by trying, getting it wrong and trying again.
Today he works with anaerobic fermentations and selective picking, and Finca La Cabaña has appeared in several editions of the Cup of Excellence Colombia, always among the 30 finalists. It is no coincidence.
San Agustín in origin
Finca La Cabaña is one of the farms we have been working with for some time. When we decided to document the origin of some of our coffees, La Cabaña was the first stop.
We sent Nicolás Fernández (@nicocinq), an audiovisual producer based in Bogotá, to spend a few days with William. What he filmed is what you see below.
Huila
Huila is probably the Colombian department most associated with specialty coffee. The Cordillera Central gives it altitude, the volcanic soils give it minerality, and the temperate climate with well-distributed rainfall does the rest. The farms here are mostly family-run, small or medium in scale, where everything is done by hand and details matter.
In recent years Huila has also become a territory of experimentation — in processes, in varieties, in ways of understanding coffee. La Cabaña Yellow Pacamara is part of that story.