This year’s crop from Yorgeny Torres is a stellar example of the coffee we love to feature at Elm: attentively cared for by small producers interested in both quality and ecology, with the end result of a cup bursting with sweetness and complexity, tasting strongly of mango, raspberry and caramel. Yorgeny Torres’s plot is part of a 2 hectare family farm, Finca La Indonesia, in Nariño that she maintains with her three siblings: Juan Angel, Gabriel and Frank. Inherited from their father Arbey Torres, the family has been producing coffee for over 50 years. Distinct from the rest of Colombia, which harvests coffee year round, Nariño has an Andean climate that results in a distinct harvest season. Coffee producers there are much smaller, and local biodiversity and soil health is maintained. Yorgeny and her siblings have embraced what makes Nariño special by focusing on cup quality and environmental protection. They’ve approached this on multiple fronts, cultivating new and old varietals, reducing chemical inputs and introducing organic material to the soils, encouraging bee activity and planting more shade trees. Yorgeny herself has been very passionate about her lot’s quality, even submitting it to the Cup of Excellence competition in Colombia. She is meticulous about processing, carefully picking cherry later in the season when she has measured concentrated sugar levels in the fruit. The coffee is processed in a low oxygen environment, sealed pickle barrels, which is now popularly referred to as anaerobic processing. Throughout processing, Yorgeny takes multiple data points: fermentation temperature, pH, brix level, and humidity, all essential for understanding what is going on with her crop and maintaining vital consistency.