COOL WEATHER 2024/25
WONDER MENU THEME:
QUINDIO - PARADISE
Quindio is located 310 miles north of the Equator with an average altitude of just under 5,000 feet, ranging from 3,609 ft - 16,896 ft above see level. The land rolls like green waves of hills, valleys and peaks at the meeting point of the intertropical convergence zone, between two sets of Andes Mountains. It's said that the name Quindio, the second smallest state in Colombia, is indigenous Quimbaya for “Paradise.”
The Cocora Valley, outside of Salento, Colombia
The particular microclimate makes it lush, ripe with a seemingly endless array of tropical fruits such as lulo, guanabana, passion fruit, loquat, soursop, and mangosteen. It’s a place where 200 foot tall palm trees harken the heavens from the top of 10,000 foot mountains, where billowy clouds swirl or fold over themselves above valleys, almost always present. Here coffee grows on bountiful shrubs all year round, with red, orange, pink, and yellow ripe cherries abound. On one branch you’ll find flowering, budding, fruiting, and ripening all at the same time.
Quindío Clouds Image by Sara Bedoya
And so, the coffee cherries must be hand picked all year; the near constant cloud cover slowing the growth and developing the flavor as the coffee cherries mature. The surrounding green, tropical fruit and animals, Earthly abundance everywhere, feels like an experience of an Earthly paradise.
Qundío is a rare place that is at the center of the Intertropical Convergence Zone. Coffee grows and ripens, at different stages on the same branches and shrubs, needing to be picked by hand at the peak of ripeness throughout the year.
Our coffee producing partners and friends who have greeted and hosted us on our two visits to Quindío have infused in us the experience of this beautiful place by sharing fruit, picking ripe coffee cherries of the most sought after varieties, by having us in their homes with their families and children, by imprinting the colors of houses in our minds and their kindnesses in our hearts.
Classic Qundío House Colors
Our co-founders Areli and Leon visited in September 2023 and 2024 to connect and collaborate with our close coffee producing partners. This year’s trip was prompted by a special collaboration with José Giraldo that will launch later this year. While there, we connected with several folks from people that we have long relations shops with to potential new ones, turning virtual connections into in-person human and flavor connections that seem to sweeten as they grow through time.
You can read about the 2023 visits here and get the sense:
Our visit from earlier this month took us even deeper and closer. These trips, places, people at home and abroad whom coffee connects us with remind of us how incredible this life can be, how friendships and flavors, commitments to well being, at times to try to speak each other’s languages or learn to drive on each others roads…at the root of it, coffee in this form is connective, shared work, shared love, shared hope, shared flavor from crop to cup and cup to crop.
These collaborations are business, and yet something more happens at almost every turn, across the bar, as across borders, something substantial feeling keeps coming up, part business, part values alignment, part feeling.
This past July, Sara Bedoya, our importing representative from Yellow Rooster Coffee, visited our shop and roastery with Ana Donneys, a 5th generation coffee farmer from Qunidío.
The visit sparked CC LKWD Cafe Leader, Melissa, to connect with Sara and start talking about our menu idea. Sara is an expert on the subject. She grew up in a family who owns the coffee farm Finca Buenos Aires in Quimbaya and coffee shop, Café Jesus Martin, in Salento, Quindio (where we had visited in 2023 before she worked with Yellow Rooster).
Image Sara Bedoya at Café Jesus Martin in Salento, Colombia
Sara passionately took up the subject and after several online meetings, proposals, drink tests, back and forths at first between Sara and Melissa, then with Leon jumping in after returning, this menu is the culmination of Sara’s proposals, Melissa’s powerful behind the scenes recipe testing, with Leon and Areli’s concept and drink/name shaping.
Melissa, CC LKWD Cafe Leader and Flavor Development Lead
Sara also proposed and collaborated on a playlist with Areli that you can find here.
It’s out of all that, and the plenty of the people, landscape, kindness of Quindio that this menu comes. In particular, the menu came to be because of Sara’s passion to work together with Melissa and us, with Sara proposing and riffing back and forth with Melissa on our drink ideas. We did the same with the names and stories that emerged from Sara’s roots as a kid who grew up in a coffee shop and as part of a coffee farm, and as a lover of this plentiful place called Qundío.
For the first time, we will be rotating 4 of the drinks through time instead of having them all at once. The drink Chocolate en Valle de Cocora will be available for the duration of the menu.
We are so grateful to Sara for her passion, time, inventiveness, and professionalism to put together the initial ideas and go back and for with Melissa and us to develop them.
This menu is the result. We hope you’ll love it!
Leon
P.S. In case you were wondering, yes, the giant wax palms and painted houses of Salento and the Valle de Cocora were a large part of the inspiration for the setting in the movie Encanto.
Qunidío - Paradise – Drinks:
Paraíso Electrónico
Espresso, tonic water, Lulo-Passion fruit syrup, topped w/ a dried lemon slice.
Image by Lauren Vied Allen
“Two things I love very much are coffee and raving. When I did pop up events at parties, this was my favorite drink. The tonic water makes it fun and the touch of lime very refreshing.”
- Sara Bedoya
Los Poderes Amazónicos
Oat milk latte with Açaí syrup & cacao nibs
"Inspired by the Amazon rainforest and diversity. This drink combines the boldness of South American coffee with the superfood powers of açaí berries. The cacao nibs, a nod to the ancient cultures that revered cacao as the "food of the gods," and a representation of Mexico Lindo!”
- SB
Gesha del Edén
10 Year Selection Gesha from José Giraldo. Pour Over served with dried fruits that connect to the flavor notes.
This drink is a special collaboration between Little Waves Coffee and world renowned producer José Giraldo. It’s a Gesha varietal, one of the most sought after in the world, the culmination of 10 years of selection grown at 6,000 ft just outside of Pijao in the Andes. “It’s unique microclimate, rich volcanic soil, and meticulous process method will make every cup an extraordinary experience.”
- SB
Turn off the noise of the day, sip and savor this coffee, thinking of the flavor notes that you taste.
Sara de Quindío Viaja al Este
Continuum Matcha with ginger orange syrup, and steamed milk.
Photo (and latte art) courtesy of the team at Café Jesus Martin, Salento, Quindío
‘The first time I went to China was in 2016, and I was amazed with everything, the rich culture, the food, and the teas! This drink is a reminder to me of the feeling I had visiting Asia for the first time.’
- SB
Chocolate en el Valle de Cocora
Dark chocolate with cardamom, cinnamon, anise, nutmeg, topped with chile de arbol powder.
“El Valle de Cocora is one of my favorite places on earth. It’s a beautiful valley full of wax palm trees, birds, and beautiful mountains. No coffee is produced here because of its high altitude, but there is nothing like drinking a hot chocolate while visiting this place.“
- SB
Select Upcoming 2024/25
Little Waves Coffees
We will soon be receiving 5-6 beautiful coffees that we are very excited about.
High up in the Andes at José Giraldo's Finca Las Marias, outside Pijao, Colombia
They are:
New relationship:
Guatemala: Atitlán Natural from the Lake Atitlán region. This is a coffee that we sourced through our colleague (Kevin Nealon of Huckleberry Coffee Roasters) and a beautiful example of what rooted relationships can build and how they can support a network for producing partners. This naturally processed coffee is incredibly sweet, fruit-forward and juicy. We are truly loving what we're tasting.
DNA box set:
We are working on releasing a box set of Eugenoides, Robusta and Arabica (from Ethiopia) to showcase where Coffea arabica's genetic parents. We are sourcing our Eugenoides from Inmaculada Coffee Farms and our Arabica from our partner Tim Hill at Atlantic Specialty Coffee. We are searching for a high quality Robusta to round this box set out. Keep your eyes peeled! It's an extremely rare opportunity to taste the two genetic parents and an heirloom Arabica from Ethiopia, Coffea arabica's origin.
Sign up for our newsletter if you want a shot at getting your hands on this set. We are also developing a new subscription called Currents that will be a combination or extremely rare, world class, and competition level coffees crossed with coffees like this set that explore the deep origins and future development of Coffea arabica as a species. As it now stands the majority of coffee species are threatened within extinction. The series shares the beauties of the flavors of coffee while also investigating it as a species on Earth.
Ongoing Relationships:
Fazenda Cachoeira - Brazil
Our relationship with Miriam Aguiar de Monteiro is one of creating a mutually supportive ecosystem for everything and everyone involved in the process of seed to cup and all around. Miriam not only practices organic methods on her farm but she extends her knowledge to support the Black Producers Program alongside Phyllis Johnson of BD Imports.
Cafe 1959 - Rio Dulce Gesha - Colombia
We are excited to have this coffee from our good friend and partner, Jose Giraldo. His work and efforts to cultivate these gesha plants has been a long time coming and we are beyond excited to share them with you all. We get candied citrus, a tea like body and floral aromatics.
Tierra de mi Padre - Natural - Mexico
It’s the time for fresh harvest to arrive to the states and we’re so excited to continue our support of this coffee. Last EXPO in Chicago I connected with Marcela Ladron of Cafés Sustentables de México and she shared a story of a woman who had been participating in the women’s group and had been producing coffee a while before we started sourcing from them. She mentioned that this woman had gotten really depressed because she was feeling devalued in her work. Around this time we had started to source from them and Marcela mentioned to her that there was a company in the US that was buying coffee specifically from the women’s group as a way to show her her own value and worth. She asked Marcella if she was just making the story up to lift her spirits but Marcella assured her and showed her a picture of our team. This woman passed but Marchella wanted to share this story with me to remind us of the impact our purchases have on the day to day lives of producers.
More to come:
We’re also figuring what we will get from our recent visit to Colombia.
In Quindío and Bogotá, Colombia, Areli and Leon connected with a series of partners and did the work to setup for a collaboration that we’re super excited about later this year.
Upon arriving we connected with Mauricio Shattah, producer of some of the world’s most sought after coffees. Leon and Mauricio got to know each other both as students in the Zurich University of Applied Science Coffee Excellence Center post grad advanced studies program.
Mauricio met us in Armenia, Quindio and took us on a tour of what he called the best processing facility in Colombia. We met him a week later in his lab in Bogotá to cup 18 coffees together and have dinner and get to know each other beyond the virtual connection that we have developed over the past year. We are hoping to put out limited trip release edition of a couple of the coffees that we tasted and are looking at incorporating more into our program in the future.
The next three days we spent with José Giraldo of Café 1959 picking coffee at his farm just outside Pijao, cupping, processing, and roasting the coffee that we picked – at his lab La Clara, and organizing for our collaboration for December at the Qima Coffee office in Armenia (Jose is also the Qima Coffee lead for South America).
The next day and ½ we spent with Edwin Noreña at Finca Campo Hermoso, just West of Armenia. We brewed our roasts of his coffees for him and Ana Maria Trujillo who roasts, processes and QC’s coffees as a key part of his team. We cupped 19 of his amazing new crop coffees, walked through his seedling and sapling setups, got into the Sidra that he is planting, and followed his production through the dry mill several miles away.
Areli and Edwin Noreña
There, we got to check out the parts of the process and the hand sorting lab, used for the highest quality coffees.
The next morning he took us to CIPA, a new women run state of the art processing facility in Calarcá. In the afternoon, we toured a couple of Ana Donney’s farms, then cupped 8 of her coffees and were treated to looking under a microscope to see microbes involved in processing and get a talk about how they approach process. Ana visited CC LKWD with Sara Bedoya in July, and we are looking into sourcing some coffee from her.
The intensive trip ended in Bogotá, after cupping with Mauricio, spending two days with Santiago of Forest Coffee whose kindness, love of Colombia, coffee and Forest came through. We source our Black Condor coffees from them.
The trip was a beautiful reminder of the actual, deep, and impactful way that Areli connects sourcing for quality, with relationship, and impact. It just words here, but in reality it feels like something that is pretty hard to described.
Areli cupping with Ana Maria Trujillo, QC and Processor at Edwin Noreña's Finca Campo Hermoso
We look forward to sharing coffees that will come out of this trip over the next year.