Regional Popayan Reserve

 

About Cofinet
Cofinet is a company ran by the Arcila family in Armenia, Quindío, in the main coffee growing axis in Colombia known as the EJE Cafetero. The company is headed by the brothers Carlos and Felipe Arcila, the 4th generation of the family to be coffee farmers and now exporters. Young and innovative, the Arcila brothers didn't have a straight path to coffee despite growing around farms and mills (their father worked for a big exporter called Racafé for 40 years!). Both of them have backgrounds in engineering and worked as such before falling in love with coffee in Australia.

“Our family always struggled with the C price. They wanted us to become doctors or engineers. Anything BUT coffee farmers. That is what we did,” Felipe remembers. When he arrived in Australia to work with Carlos in 2012, the brothers became regulars at specialty coffee shops and joined as many cupping sessions as they could. “‘How come we can’t sell our family’s coffee here?’ we thought. So we started sending roasters samples from our farms and… It didn’t go very well. Our father had been focused on quantity and efficiency, not quality.”

They decided to leave the “boring engineering life”, as Felipe puts it, in 2015, when they founded Cofinet. “Roasters are very knowledgeable in Australia and there is a lot of competition, so I went back to Colombia to take care of sourcing and quality and my brother stayed,” Felipe explains. With renewed efforts in quality, everything changed. “We started producing naturals and honeys, at the time very new to Colombia, and realized we could upgrade the cup quality of a lot from 83 to 88 points and sell it for a good price! We also wanted to share it with other farmers, so we created an internship program to teach them new post-harvest methods.”

Cofinet has a fully integrated chain in Australia and is partnering with Algrano for the first time to offer coffees directly to Europen roasters. They source coffees from other estates and associations other than their own farms, including Finca La Marianela (another partner of Algrano), APROCEM, ACEBGA and ASORCAFE. They are committed to regarding quality and pay an average of 15% above the local price for parchment for their regional blends (sourced by Felipe according to physical and sensory characteristics to reflect the profile of an area), 30-35% to the "regional plus" blends and between 50% and 70% more to micro-lots. They can offer full traceability and transparency to roasters, as well as facilitate direct relationships between you and specific farmers. As they say: "Our aim is to encourage direct trade between our farmers at origin and roasters around the globe. We pride ourselves on creating sustainable, ethical and long-term relationships." 

Farmer internship program
At the La Pradera processing centre in Armenia, Cofinet offers a six-day free program that allows farmers to process their cherries at their processing centre to learn how they do it.  "In this program, farmers are exposed to alternative fermentation processes such as natural and honey fermentation. They will spend six days with our professional team learning specific details of each processing method. The intention is to give them the tools to be able to process at least 40% of their next harvest using alternative fermentation processes at their own farms." 

Other than learning in detail about how to produce honeys, naturals and fully washed coffees with extended fermentation, the main thing farmers get from the program is knowledge on how to avoid defects. "We really emphasize hand-sorting and how to store the coffee well. We have a lot of humidity here and that is one of the main factors that affect the quality of the coffee. It sounds simple, but if they get it right the difference is huge," Felipe explains.

Cofinet has welcomed more than 30 farmers so far at their internship program. According to Felipe, some producers have developed their own techniques and export coffees by themselves.