Finca La Candela: A Second Harvest from the Lotero Cano Family

This is our second harvest from Finca La Candela, and the third year that we've been sourcing through Paisa Coffee, the producer-led importing operation founded by Yolima Taborda Rojas in 2015. The thing that has become clear over these three years, and that we expect will only continue to clarify, is that working with the same producers across multiple seasons changes the texture of the work in a way that is difficult to fully describe but easy to feel. The conversations are longer. The shared context is deeper. The coffee that arrives at the roastery in the second or third year of a relationship carries something the first lot, however good, could not.

The Family Behind the Farm

Finca La Candela sits in Titiribí, in the village of La Loma del Guamo, on the steep Antioquian slopes between sixteen hundred and eighteen hundred meters. The farm belongs to Alberto Lotero and Gloria Cano, who met in 1985 and have spent the years since building a life on land they have, piece by piece, made their own. Eight years ago they expanded the farm with a parcel acquired from a neighbor named Luis Rios, and have over time cultivated it into a ten-thousand-tree operation. Their two daughters and son grew up on that land. They are third-generation coffee farmers, which is a way of saying that the kind of care they bring to every step of production is not something a single grower could develop alone — it is the accumulation of decades of family practice, attention, and correction.

Paisa Coffee

This coffee comes to us through Paisa Coffee, a producer-led importing group founded by Yolima Taborda Rojas in 2015. Yolima was raised on her family's coffee farm in Antioquia, studied in the United States, and started Paisa for one straightforward reason: to give producers like her family, friends, and neighbors a path out of the commodity market and into traceable, fairly paid relationships with roasters who would represent their coffees honestly. Her approach is direct. She sources standout lots, pays fair premiums, and represents each coffee with full transparency from the farm to the roastery. What started with her own family's harvests has grown into a network of partner farms across southwestern Antioquia, and in 2024 her brother Germán joined the operation to expand what is possible for the producers in their network.

Last year Yolima delivered our coffee to the roastery herself and gave our team an in-depth presentation on Paisa's mission, the realities of small-farm coffee in Colombia, and the work she is doing to create viable pathways for producers to grow beyond subsistence-level pricing. The kind of direct connection that comes from being in the same room with the person who sourced the coffee, who knows the family that grew it, who has walked the rows of trees that produced it, is what we mean when we talk about relationships in this work.

About the Lot

This year's release is the natural-processed lot from Finca La Candela, on Red and Yellow Castillo varietals, processed using a combined fermentation protocol of fifty hours aerobic followed by twelve hours anaerobic. The longer fermentation builds depth and structure, the slow drying preserves the fruit, and the result is a cup that runs dark, juicy, and a little wild around the edges.

In the cup: blackberry, pineapple juice, and lil boozy.

The lot rewards a careful pour-over or Chemex.

A Closing Note

Three years in with Paisa. Two harvests in with the Lotero Cano family. We are grateful to Yolima, to Germán, and to everyone at Finca La Candela for trusting us with another year of their work, and grateful to the customers who reach for a bag of this coffee and let that work travel a little further into the world.

Available now and at all Mudhouse cafes.