Carmelita, Washed Caturra, Bolivia

Flavour description: A fruity and chocolatey aroma. A mild and sweet coffee with flavour of candy floss and mature red grapes with lots of floral notes reminding of buttercup, combined with a lemon acidity. A long-lasting mango flavour in the finish. The coffee is creamy with a medium body. 

Colour to describe flavour: Red
Category: Curious
Producer: Carmela "Carmelita" Urduvi
Varietal: Caturra 
Process: Washed 
Location: Copacabana,  Caranavi, Bolivia 
Elevation: 1550 – 1850 Meters above sea level
Farm size: Three hectares
Harvest: September 2023
Price transparency: The FOB price paid for this coffee is $4.60/Ib

We visited Carmelita for the first time in 2015, and have been buying coffee from her ever since. Her hard work and dedication to the farm impresses us as much today as it did then. Carmelita is easily one of the strongest people we've ever met in this business. She originally had less than a hectare with a very small yield. Then after being hit with Roja (leaf rust), she joined the sustainability project “Sol de la Mañana”, which is run by our exporter Pedro Rodriguez. With their help, Carmelita successfully turned things around, and in 2019 Sol de la Mañana even won the SCA Award for Most Sustainable Business Model.

When we first met Carmelita she had just prepared her land for a second hectare and was ready to start planting her new Caturra and Catuaí seedlings from her nursery. This time she wanted to do everything right from the beginning and, with the help of the agronomists in Sol de la Mañana, she did. We've since watched her farm grow to three hectares, with a lush and abundant production, and today we proudly boast European exclusivity on all of the coffees produced there.

Unlike anyone else we've met in Bolivia, Carmelita is known to clean each cherry after picking and before putting it into her bags and delivering it for processing at the Rodriguez mill. She believes that joining the project has helped her to better understand what she needs to do to consistently produce better coffee and keep her crops healthy and strong. By producing a better quality coffee she is also able to earn more money and have a better future for herself and her children.

To learn more about Carmelita, click here. To watch a short interview we did with her while in Bolivia click here.