Visiting Finca La Soledad pt.1:The Farm
If you happened to pass by the Brewista booth at SCA Expo Chicago 2024, you may have caught glimpse of a father-son duo handing out brews. Coffee producers Pepe Jijon of Finca La Soledad and Jose Jijon of Finca San Pedro handed me their brews of the proprietarily named tyoxidator typica mejorado and wave wash sidra respectively.
BQ, LLC at SCA Expo 2024 in Chicago
Coffee is global, but it’s a small world, and we ended up getting dinner together that evening - discussing the semantics and technicalities of what is/n’t Chicago style pizza. After a brave shot of Malort, Brian was on board for his first origin trip, not to the resort farms of Panama, not to the thermalshock eco-enigma bioreactors of Colombia, but deep into the Imbabura Valley of Ecuador.
What a move to get the Youtuber to commit on camera
As promised, Jose met us at Quito’s UIO airport, perhaps the most straightforward international airport I’ve been screened through. We’d stay the night at a nearby household in the city, and make our way to the farm the next morning. Uncertain whether I was feeling overstimulation from a new environment or my brain was oxygen deprived at 2400MASL (why not both?), there’s a balancing act maintained across staying hydrated, overcaffeinating, and being conscious about the water sources your gut biome is compatible with.
We briefly played in the Quito lab before heading to Finca La Soledad. Perhaps the best-equipped coffee station in Ecuador, there were many familiar names and shapes. Outstanding was the shrine to the roasters that they felt had done their beans justice, we’ll come back to this later. As Pepe is often back and forth between farms and the city, this is one of the locations where Instinto QC occurs, hence the roaster and lab setup. Having crept through Pepe’s roasting activities on Instagram, I knew there was an EK43 on site. What I did not realize was the cost it took them to acquire one given their scarcity in the region. A personal agenda item for me was to bring and share what the modern home enthusiast is using, and a set of SSP 98mm high-uniformity now eagerly awaits installation.
Base of the Imbabura Volcano
You could virtually tour a trip prior to your arrival via Google maps street, and I did. But seldom does it prepare you for the reality of the local scenery. From Quito to Finca La Soledad would be a 3-4hr drive. Jose, ever the wonderful tour guide, pointed out geographic features throughout the valley and how the mythological mountain entities gives locals the stories to rationalize the erratic microclimates.
Despite knowing that the weather would be sporadic at the best of times, Ecuador still showed off its contrast with how clear and distant into the valley I could see at one moment, then one hilly switchback later, less than 10ft of visibility in fog. This was particularly worrisome combined with the epidemic of abandoned dogs in the middle of the winding roads, coming towards the truck, awaiting either food scraps to be tossed out the window or a door to be opened to a new home. The final stretch towards the farm justified why we were in a 4x4 truck - a highly inclined, loosely gravelled pathway meant you’d never end up at Finca La Soledad on accident.
Minutes after unloading, we were quick to reach for kettle. Jose is a bonafide modern coffee nerd, perhaps the most up-to-date in the country. His mental library contains the latest brewing trends and equipment, but what I observed is a similar emotion expressed by enthusiasts I meet - doubt that some goodness isn’t extracted, that the results aren’t the same as what the omniscient influencers are achieving; I hope we were able to dispel some of those doubts. The double edged sword of online tutelage is choice complexity - the overwhelming feeling of more options being presented without understanding how to arrive at a solution, where a single right answer may not even exist. But where recipes may cast a shadow of doubt again, an xBloom Studio now sits in the lab as a medium to bridge the gap of consistency and for us to stay connected in sharing our latest brew approaches.
As we sipped on an Apollon’s Gold sidra tyoxidator and talked nerdy, the man on the bag made his entrance; Pepe had been on the farm for weeks through a peak harvesting stint. There’s little time for sitting down with grand hellos - farming is happening and the clock is ticking; we down our brews and Brian and I grab our cameras to walk down the lane to where the magic happens.
Scrolling through the image slideshow in coffee product listings aims to give you a sense of the craft that goes into what you’re purchasing, but I’d been unsatisfied at not being able to dig deeper. My primary goal in this trip was to fill in the frames in between - what’s the scale of the operation? How many people does it take to achieve a certain yield? What does one farm do that another doesn’t which results in a world class or commodity grade bean? At Finca La Soledad, I got to observe perhaps the best case scenario of this, some like family, some actual family. Everyone’s specialization and participation is indispensable, and the higher-than-average Ecuadorian wages reflect their expertise; happy farm, happy coffee.
Harvesting cherries happens early in the morning and fully utilizes the daytime hours. We’d wake up at 7am on the farm, early for us. But the ladies of the farm have already hiked over 30min around the valley and are in the thick of the forest with kilos of ripe, crimson beans already in their hip-holstered buckets. We didn’t see them too often during this part of the day, but we knew they were nearby from the singing and chatting coming through the leaves. Like gifts from magical forest fairies, every few times we went outside we’d find an unattended, glowing tub of cherries on the side of the road, ready to be trucked over for sorting.
Towards sunset, I’d indulge in another passion of mine - landscape photography. The Imbabura Valley displays shapes and lines I haven’t encountered in the United States - the twists and the turns of the land have still yet to be fully tamed and reshaped by mankind. To the photographer brain, landscape photos are of terrains and portraits are of people, but in that moment behind the viewfinder, the ladies of the farm were features within the scenery, waving at me as they disappeared around the valley to their respective homes.
In the span of our trip, we got to observe a milestone event on the farm - Paola got herself some hot wheels. Pepe, Miguelito, and a local seller had long been coordinating this effort to get her mobility. It connected me back to the sight the day prior, and was a scenes that couldn’t be predicted or appreciated if you were purely there for the coffee - to witness the events of those working in coffee not as coffee professionals, but as individuals who have their own lives to live. Lunch breaks became a bit more lively to the sound of a new motor on the farm.
Jose continued to impressed me more and more throughout the days spent with him. To be raised with the coffee plants and have a sixth sense for interpreting the coffee is a superhero origin story on its own. When asked about what he’d like us to bring, his only request was for the English version of stoic philosophy books, which I saw swell with bookmarks and sticky notes as he gobbled them down nightly after a long day’s work. Observing the day-to-days, he truly is a son of the farm in the best way possible - tightly integrated with each member of the team and seamlessly part of the team fabric. He is plenty much his own person, with a love for Brazilian jiu-jitsu and video games, and so shockingly well-spoken about his prospects and motivations. I can’t wait to see how he leaves his mark and continues to grow the already impressive Finca San Pedro. In an industry where bleak outlooks are the unfortunate norm and the future is riddled with uncertainty, knowing that there are individuals like Jose gives me a bit more faith.
Being hosted on a farm is no small cost. The pace of farming cannot slow down for the guest, and it is not a vacation for those on the farm. Resources are pre-considered for each extra mouth to feed; there is no McDonalds down the street if you get midnight munchies. Instead, we got to experience the rainbow of fruits and produce we hadn’t heard of, at their freshest. Whether they be too fragile to ship or too under-the-radar, Ecuador is a powerhouse of fruits that I’ll likely not encounter elsewhere. Bringing it back to the coffee, it’s a reminder that local availability influences our individual perceptions and shapes the mental associations and vocabulary we reach for when discussing flavor notes. The local dishes were both fresh and hearty - you could feel that they came from the land and not from a factory, and brimming with the sustenance needed to support the physical demands of farming. Thank you Monique, for the love and effort you put into each dish.
The team, from the left: Jessie, Ana, Isa, Rosario, Pepe, Miguelito, Paola, Victor a.k.a. Don V, Jose, Monique
On the proverbial bingo card of this coffee hobby, you can buy the expensive gear, run a coffee shop, and try all the beans your remaining bank balance affords you, but there’s a sudden click in perspective that snaps into focus once you visit a coffee farm and witness the labor involved. All those trees, all those tubs of cherry culminating down to a shockingly small final yield of bags; it’s hard not to become an evangelist of uplifting the value of coffee. I thought I’d done my homework - I’ve watched the online semi-documentaries on coffee processing and read up on what I could about coffee farming practices. None of that prepared me for the epistemic experience of coffee production and being on the farm, and that’s because I engaged that material to learn only about coffee, not the ecosystem, livelihoods, and humanity that surrounds coffee production.
More to come in pt2, were we talk about coffee.
Until then, some photos:
