Colombia Finca La Merced, Washed

Origin

Yacuanquer, Nariño, Colombia 

The story of specialty coffee in Nariño, Colombia began in 1945, when Enrique Vásquez, a young paisa from Medellín, ventured to lower Manhattan to learn the coffee trade at the Colombian coffee trading firm Adolfo Aristazábal. Seven years later, the company sent him back to Colombia to set up operations in Pasto, a sleepy provincial capital in southwestern Colombia with little coffee, few cars and fewer banks. 

Before long, Vásquez bought out his partners in New York and rebranded his family-owned export business Empresas de Nariño. When Vásquez arrived in Nariño’s capital in 1952, the region was producing fewer than 20,000 bags of coffee annually, and every weekend he would leave Pasto with bags full of cash to pay growers. By the late 1980s, Starbucks began selling its single-origin Colombia Nariño Supremo – it was the first time the region’s distinctive coffee profile had been presented to coffee consumers in the United States. During the early 2000s, Starbucks was buying almost all the coffee grown in Nariño.

By the late 2000s, Nariño’s coffee sector was considerably more crowded after pioneers of coffee’s ‘third wave’ began arriving, looking to capitalise on the “Nariño” label and source fully traceable single-farm and community lots. Today, Nariño produces around 450,000 70kg bags of coffee, and programs such as the Cup of Excellence auction and more widely shared information about coffee growers and communities have enabled the nearly 40,000 coffee growers in the region to be recognised for their quality coffee across the globe.