Every bag of our Hearth house blend leans on one farm above all: Finca La Ronda, a twelve-hectare plot at 1,750 metres in Huila, Colombia, run by the Rodríguez family for three generations.
Why this farm
Harriet first cupped La Ronda’s washed caturra at a Bogotá trade fair in 2019 and rated it top of a blind table of forty. It tasted like toffee and blood orange then, and it still does — remarkable consistency for a smallholding that dries everything on raised beds under Andean cloud.
What direct trade actually means here
We agree on a price with Don Mateo Rodríguez before the harvest, not after — this year 74% above the fair-trade floor. That certainty is what let the family plant a new lot of pink bourbon (which we cannot wait to roast in 2027) and put a new roof on the drying station after last year’s storms.
It also means we carry the good years and the hard ones together. In 2024, when leaf rust took a third of the crop, we paid the agreed price on the reduced volume and blended around the gap rather than dropping the farm. That is the whole point of the model.
Taste it thinking of the place
Next time you order a magic, know that the chocolate backbone of it dried on a hillside eleven thousand kilometres away under the watch of a very good farm dog named Canela. Coffee is never just coffee.