Our Origins

PitaCoffee was formed to assist a few coffee farmers at a time in the area of Pitalito, Huila, Colombia to upgrade and develop better practices in their labor towards harvesting and handling of their product which is green coffee beans.  We have invested in a program with some experts on specialty coffees to train the farmers to work out some practices in the coffee production that will ensure the quality of the product so that they start producing nothing but specialty coffee and the added profit value of the coffee stays within the farm, upgrading their way of living. We have selected 18 farms of the region to work with, developing  a closed relationship with them and teaching them that coffee, been a food product has to be treated with the highest quality standards of processing so that at the end we not only have clean coffee beans but the best tasting specialty coffee possible for the world international market.  For this purpose we have hired a team of consultants to assist us in this endeavor, of which, we will be reporting on the progress and the results in this blog. 

We found out that the standard practice among most of the farmers is to wait till most of the coffee trees are in the ripen state and all in a short period of time, hire workers to strip the beans whether partially ripe to even over ripe in one pass and have them all milled to remove the flesh of the raw coffee cherries, ferment them and then the beans are taken to their drying place to be dried for a few days before bagging them to be sold to the Coffee Federation or to large international coffee companies. This will result in, basically selling them at the lowest going price on the market.

The coffee buyers whether coffee companies or the Federation will take the coffee beans and threshed them to remove the parchment, select out the good green beans from the bad, to sell the good green beans at an increased profit for themselves and the bad will be sold to the local market in order to make instant coffee, decaffeinated coffee or for commercial purposes, called "pasilla".  This is the normal current system of the coffee market.

By influencing the local coffee farmers to improve their standards in managing the picking of the cherries, selecting out the best cherries (the richest ripe cherries) as they become ripe (weekly) to be milled, fermented, dried to 10 -12% moisture, and bagged for threshing all within certain guidelines will result in the best green bean possible (Specialty Coffee).  Also by teaching the farmers about the quality of their product that will be highly marketable and will ensure an ongoing sustainable production and more earnings to the grower; consequently they will better their livelihood, not only for themselves but also for their workers.