Colombia Proyecto Renacer

Cup Score: 86

ORIGIN: Colombia – Antioquia
PRODUCERS: Proyecto Renacer, led by Cristian and Jhonatan Raigosa
VARIETY: Castillo, Colombia, Bourbon, Caturra, Pajarito, Cenicafé
PROCESSING: Anaerobic Honey, 170-hour fermentation
HARVEST TIME: Varies by microclimate
ALTITUDE: 2,000 masl

Tasting Notes: Yellow Stone Fruit, Mango, Sugarcane

A Coffee From the Hills Above Medellín

Most Colombian coffee comes from the countryside. This one comes from a neighborhood. La Sierra sits in the hills above Medellín at 2,000 meters, a place that for decades was better known for cartel violence than for anything grown there. Today it grows some of the most interesting coffee in Antioquia.

This lot runs through the project's signature fermentation protocol. Cherries are picked, depulped, and left in the mucilage, then sealed into tanks for 170 hours of anaerobic fermentation. That length would ruin most lots. It works here because the cool mountain air of La Sierra slows the sugar breakdown to a pace the brothers can measure and control. What comes out is a cup full of yellow fruit, ripe and layered, with the kind of sweetness that lingers.

A Neighborhood Rebuilt Around Coffee

The project started by accident. Cristian and Jhonatan Raigosa received a coffee sample from La Sierra and were surprised it existed at all. Coffee from inside Medellín was unheard of. They cupped it, found something unusual, and decided to find the farmer.

Going into La Sierra meant going into a place that had been a war zone for a generation, documented in film, avoided by most of the city. They went anyway. They met Don Gabriel and discovered he was not alone. There were more growers, more small farms, and geography nearly perfect for specialty production.

So they built something. Proyecto Renacer now coordinates more than 30 growers across roughly 13 farms averaging two hectares each, processing the coffee together so smallholders can capture value that cooperative prices never gave them. Hogar Casa Claret, a local addiction recovery center, farms a large plot of its own, and the proceeds fund its rehabilitation programs.

Cristian works the consumption side as one of Colombia's respected roasters and baristas. Jhonatan works the field: producer relations, quality control, administration. Between them they have spent six years developing fermentation protocols good enough that other farms in the network have adopted them.

What They Are Proud Of

Ask them and they will not lead with cup scores. They will tell you that people in La Sierra now have legal, decent work in their own neighborhood, that families are not making punishing commutes down the mountain, and that children in the barrio have programs to attend through the year. The coffee is the mechanism. The neighborhood is the point.

Renacer Means Rebirth

La Sierra used to be a place you did not go. Now it is a place you can visit without fear, quiet in a way only mountaintops are. Every bag carries that turn: from a barrio defined by what happened to it, to a barrio defined by what it grows.