The 2026 Harvest Has Landed
On 28 October we got the email we had been waiting most of a year for: the coffee has arrived at the warehouse.
Seventeen bags. 595 kilograms of green coffee, three different lots, every one of them grown on land we have a stake in. This is the biggest thing we have ever done as a roastery, and it is worth explaining properly — because the three bags about to appear on our shelf are the end of a story that started with a broken-down situation and a handshake.
How we came to own trees in Colombia
If you have been around a while you know the name Luna Azul. It was a black honey Colombian from a young producer called Andrés Cardona, and it was one of the best coffees ever to come through our roaster. We bought it year after year through our friends at Unblended.
Then Andrés left the family farm and struck out on his own — eight acres in Santa Bárbara, Antioquia, called Finca La Ilusión. He moved so he could focus on the craft he actually cares about: processing. But a new farm starts bare, and the equipment that turns cherry into a finished, sellable lot is expensive. Without it, a producer sells cherry at commodity prices and somebody else keeps the margin.
So we made a trade. No charity, no middleman, no hundred-page contract. We sent Andrés the capital for a mechanical dryer. In exchange he set aside a dedicated plot — about 1,200 coffee trees — for The Roasted Record for five years, with a full say in how that coffee is grown and processed.
That plot is Finca Primer Paso. First Step Farm.
Year two: we bought all of it
Year one was tiny. The trees were barely old enough to fruit and the whole harvest came to 48 kilograms.
This year is different. We bought Andrés' entire 2026 harvest from his own land. Not a lot, not a selection — everything his own trees grew.
To be precise about what that does and does not mean: Andrés also buys cherry from neighbouring farms and processes it on site. He is very good at it, and that coffee goes to other roasters. What we have is everything grown on his trees. We are the only ones receiving it.
It matters more than it sounds. A producer who sells cherry gets paid for cherry. A producer who sells a finished lot he grew and processed keeps both shares. Committing to the whole harvest up front is what lets him plan a season instead of spending it looking for buyers.
The three coffees
Here is the part we find genuinely exciting. These are the same fruit, off the same trees, taken in three completely different directions in the wet mill. Drink all three and you are not tasting terroir — you are tasting processing. We cannot think of a better way to understand what Andrés actually does.
Luna Azul — Black Honey
The one that started all of this, and the first Luna Azul ever grown on Andrés' own land. Cherries ferment a full week in open tanks, then are depulped without water so the sticky mucilage stays on the bean through drying. Blueberry, dark chocolate, syrupy body.
Red Sunset — Semi-Washed
The cleanest and most classically Colombian of the three. If Purple Honey sounds like too much and you want to taste the farm rather than the fermentation, start here.
Purple Honey — Sugar Cane Ferment
The boldest, and the one for drinkers who like a coffee that argues back. A 96-hour closed-tank fermentation with sugar cane honey added to bring the whole mass up to roughly 15% sweetness before it starts breaking down. Blueberry, cocoa nib, red wine. Fermentation-forward and unapologetic about it.
All three are $27.95 for 12 oz, whole bean, and all three are on the site now.
What we put back into the land
Owning a plot means more than cashing in a harvest. Year two funds an agronomy programme run by Sandra Tamayo — an agricultural engineer and Q Grader who walks the field rows and then cups the results herself.
In October the soil and leaf-tissue samples came back from the National University of Colombia, and they were genuinely interesting. The lime applied earlier in the year worked: pH came up from 4.9 to 5.0 and aluminium dropped. But a new limitation replaced the old one — potassium is low, and foliar nitrogen is below its critical range. Andrés bought the fertiliser the day the results landed and spent the next day mixing the blend by hand, because no single product matched what the analysis called for.
The part we like best: most of Sandra's recommendation is a list of things not to buy. No more lime. No magnesium to correct a ratio on paper. No micronutrient blends. We are paying an agronomist for a fertilisation plan and she keeps talking us out of inputs.
And when she finished, Andrés asked her to extend the plan to his other two plots. A programme we fund for 1,200 trees now covers all 18,200 trees on the farm. That was his idea, not ours.
Every soil test, lab result, field report and cupping score sheet she has sent us is published, unedited, on the farm page — including the unflattering numbers. There are eleven documents up there now.
What happens next
The coffee is at the warehouse. We are scheduling the release, trucking it down to Stuart, and then it has to be roasted and rested — coffee is better several days off the roaster than it is on day one, and we are not going to ship you something that has not settled.
If you have already pre-ordered, you will get an email with your roast date before it ships. If you have not, the pre-order is still open and we will fill orders in the order they came in.
We have been writing about this farm for a year and a half. It is a strange feeling to have it sitting in a warehouse ninety minutes up the coast.
