Jorge Rojas is a producer and processor whose career in coffee has been shaped as much by necessity as by curiosity. Born and raised in Planadas, Jorge lost his father at the age of five. By the time he was thirteen, he had left school to help support his family, working two days a week on the family’s small farm, El Jardín, and the remaining days as a laborer on neighboring farms.
In those early years, production at El Jardín was very basic. The family didn’t have much infrastructure- only a manual de-pulper mounted on a tree trunk- and without drying infrastructure on the farm, they sold their coffee wet. In 2005, heavy rains triggered landslides that closed the road between the farm and Planadas for nearly two weeks. Without a way to transport his coffee and no option to let it spoil, Jorge dried the coffee himself for the first time.
When the road reopened, Jorge took his parchment coffee to Planadas. The market was flooded with coffee, buyers ran out of liquidity, and payments were delayed. Needing immediate income, Jorge brought his coffee to ASOPEP, the local cooperative, where he was told that coffee was only purchased based on cup quality. Two hours after leaving a sample, he received a call with an offer. His coffee had cupped well, and a foreign buyer (not us back then!) was willing to pay more than three times the prevailing market price at the time. Soon, Jorge began to work with ASOPEP, learning to sample grade and cup, and taking fermentation and processing courses. He worked as a quality analyst for ASOPEP for many years, and ASOPEP has been a source of great support for Jorge over the years.
Today, Jorge operates his own wet processing plant on land purchased within ASOPEP- he calls this La Central. All of his coffee is processed there- often in sealed blue plastic barrels or silos for varieties that tolerate oxidation well- and dried using a combination of guardiola dryers and silos. His drying protocols are precise: guardiola batches of 700 kg are dried for approximately 180 hours at carefully controlled temperatures, followed by resting periods at 18–20% moisture to stabilize and enhance aromatic potential before final drying in silos.
Jorge now owns and manages several farms at approximately 1,980 meters above sea level, including La Roca (the first farm he purchased), El Experimental, and Los Procesos. While some older regional varieties remain, most plantings are recent and focus on exotic cultivars such as gesha, wush wush, yellow bourbon, pink bourbon, and caturra chiroso. These farms benefit from rested soils, as they were previously abandoned and free from recent chemical inputs, allowing for a clean restart with agronomic guidance from a professional agronomist. In the field, Jorge combines targeted synthetic fertilization at the base of the plant with organic foliar applications.
Jorge lives in Planadas but is preparing to move back to the farm, where he is building a house and additional lodging to host clients. His mother, Mercedes, now 80, lives in town, while the rest of the family remains deeply involved in coffee. His son Felipe, age 12, is already engaged in cupping and barista work, showing a particular enthusiasm for sensory evaluation. Jorge’s partner Erika works with him in sales, and her sister supports the business as its accountant.
PROCESSING
Jorge’s processing is meticulous and exact, the result of many harvests of experimentation and side by side cupping with us. He starts with red and ripe cherries, and then leaves the cherries in sealed plastic bags for an initial fermentation step- natural yeast and bacteria enter where the stem of the cherry was picked, and begin to break down the sugars in the cherries. After about 24 hours, he de-pulps the coffee, and then puts the depulped coffee in sealed plastic barrels for around 48 hours to ferment. The sealed plastic barrels (we call them canecas in Spanish) keep the coffee nice and cool, and allows for a long and cool fermentation- he measures temperature, and it never reaches above 23 C. He monitors the coffee’s fermentation curve throughout the fermentation processing, measuring sugars, pH and temperature to ensure that the same conditions are met every time that he processes. Once the coffee is ready to wash, he washes it just once and takes it to his mechanical dryer to dry, where it dries over the course of about a week. The coffee undergoes multiple phases of drying and “rest” periods (to stabilize and homogenize the moisture), at temperatures between 30 – 38 degrees.
PRICE TRANSPARENCY
We purchase parchment coffee directly from Jorge, and pesos are transferred straight to his bank account upon receipt of parchment at our chosen mill. We pay for transport from Tolima to the mill. We paid 4,300,000 pesos per carga (125 kilos of parchment coffee, this is the unit farmers sell their coffee in) for his caturra chiroso.
