The Farm: Finca Monteblanco in Acevedo

Finca Monteblanco sits on the winding mountain roads of Vereda La Tocora in the San Adolfo municipality above Pitalito — one of the most remote and highest-quality corners of Colombia's Huila department. The farm spans 14 to 18 hectares, perched on the crest of a hill with the wet mill and drying facilities at the top and the coffee slopes descending below. At 1,730 metres above sea level, with the Suaza river flowing nearby and the Cueva de los Guácharos National Park as backdrop, Monteblanco occupies some of the most compelling land in southern Huila.

The farm is managed by Rodrigo Sánchez Valencia alongside his wife Claudia Samboni, farm manager Don Gerardo, and a small dedicated team. The operation is part of the Aromas del Sur group — a partnership that also includes Finca Progreso and Finca La Loma — and exports through Clearpath Coffee, a company founded by experienced agricultural trader Vicente Mejía that focuses on direct, traceable, relationship-based supply chains.

The Producer: A Third-Generation Farmer Who Learned to Cup

Rodrigo Sánchez Valencia is a third-generation coffee farmer. His grandfather and father grew coffee on the same land before him, but neither thought about it in terms of cup quality. Coffee was what the land produced; what it tasted like was someone else's concern. That changed in 2002, when Rodrigo participated in a local programme teaching children of coffee producers how to cup and evaluate lots. For the first time, he could connect what happened on the farm — fertilisation, harvest timing, drying protocol — to what ended up in the cup.

That revelation set the course for everything that followed. Rodrigo began studying competitions and noticed a pattern: farms would win recognition one year and then never be heard from again. He concluded that inconsistency was the enemy of excellence, and built his entire approach around repeatability — engineering processing protocols that could produce the same result harvest after harvest, regardless of weather variations or other factors. He studied alongside Elkin Guzman of Finca El Mirador in Pitalito, learning experimental processing techniques, and built a close relationship with coffee cupper Wbeimar Lasso in Pitalito, whom Rodrigo credits as a crucial influence on finding the true potential of his coffees.

"He has been a crucial influence in my career, because he guides me, and he has helped me to find the true potential of my coffee." — Rodrigo Sánchez Valencia, on cupper Wbeimar Lasso

The Discovery: Purple Caturra

The pivotal moment in Finca Monteblanco's story came when Rodrigo began systematically exploring the trees his grandfather had planted in the 1980s. Among the standard Caturra and Bourbon plants, he found something unusual: a Caturra-type plant whose cherries ripened not to the standard red colour but to a deep, striking purple. He brought the observation to Wbeimar Lasso, who cupped the lots and confirmed that the purple-cherry trees were producing distinctly different — and superior — sensory characteristics to conventional Caturra.

The variety, which Rodrigo named "La Caturra Púrpura," is not a well-documented genetic event. It is believed to be a natural mutation or a unique selection within the Caturra population — a Caturra plant that at some point developed the capacity to produce purple-pigmented cherries rather than the standard red. Whatever the mechanism, the pigmentation appears to correlate with elevated sugar content and a unique aromatic profile in the cup: more intense, more complex, and more suited to the experimental co-fermentation protocols that Rodrigo was developing in parallel.

The Brix-Based Processing System

One of Monteblanco's most distinctive innovations is its Brix-based approach to processing decisions. Rather than choosing a processing method based on convenience or tradition, Rodrigo's team measures the sugar content of each incoming cherry lot using a refractometer, and assigns the appropriate processing protocol based on the result.

The cold fermentation method — pioneered by Rodrigo in 2015, taking inspiration from winemaking's temperature-controlled fermentation — is kept between 10–13°C and runs for 76 hours. This slower, colder process preserves the sweetness from high-sugar cherries without the risk of spoilage or excessive acidity that warmer fermentation would produce.

The Co-Ferment Process: Mother Culture System

Monteblanco's co-fermented lots are built on a proprietary mother culture system — one of the most sophisticated producer-level fermentation protocols in Colombian specialty coffee. The process begins not with the coffee itself but with a microbial culture derived from Purple Caturra cherries, then fed with fruit and sugar to create a living fermentation medium that carries both microbial diversity and fruit-derived flavour compounds.

1. A mother culture is created using microorganisms naturally present in Purple Caturra cherries — lactobacillus and saccharomyces cerevisiae are among the primary organisms cultivated.
2. 80 litres of this culture are separated and fed with panela (unrefined cane sugar) and concentrated fruit juice — strawberry, passionfruit, watermelon, mango, or citrus depending on the target flavour profile. This mixture ferments for 190 hours to reach the desired Brix and pH values.
3. Incoming coffee cherries are measured for Brix, floated to remove impurities, and pulped.
4. Pulped coffee is placed in a sealed 200-litre tank. The 80-litre fruit culture is added, and the combined mixture ferments for 150 hours. The team monitors continuously to ensure the environment stays above 6° Brix and above pH 4.
5. Coffee is dried in direct sunlight for 2–3 days, then moved to shaded canopies for 15–18 days until target moisture is reached.

Monteblanco's Lot Portfolio

Monteblanco produces a wide and growing range of lots, each using the same Purple Caturra base variety processed through different fruit culture protocols. The result is a family of coffees that share the farm's foundational character — consistent sweetness, silky body, reliable structure — while expressing completely different aromatic directions depending on the fruit used in the culture.

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