If you've been following The Roasted Record for a while, you already know the name Luna Azul. It's the coffee that made us fall in love with the work of Andrés Cardona, a young producer in Santa Bárbara, Antioquia, Colombia. Black honey process, Castillo and Colombia varieties, grown at altitude — it was one of the best coffees to ever come through our roaster, and one we kept coming back to year after year through our friends at Unblended Coffee.

Luna Azul was made on his family's farm, Villa Lucía — land where Andrés could grow and process his coffee alongside the people he learned from.

When the time came to write his own chapter, Andrés moved on from Villa Lucía to a smaller farm of his own — eight acres in Santa Bárbara called Finca La Ilusión. It was a deliberate choice, made so he could focus on the craft that made Luna Azul special in the first place: processing. But a new farm starts almost bare. The equipment that turns a harvest into finished, sellable coffee is expensive, and without it a producer is stuck selling cherries at commodity prices instead of crafting his own lots.

The producer behind one of our favorite coffees on the planet had the land and the talent — what he needed was the setup. That's where we came in.

Michael and Lucas at Unblended got the three of us talking, and together with Andrés we worked out something unconventional. No charity, no middlemen, no hundred-page contract — a trade:

We sent Andrés the capital to buy a mechanical coffee dryer — the piece of processing equipment his new farm needed most to run as a real operation. In exchange, Andrés set aside a dedicated plot of coffee trees for The Roasted Record for five years — about 1,200 of them — with a full say in how the coffee is grown and processed, and the first lot off that land as ours alone.

You'll hear the word “sustainable” on a lot of coffee bags. We think it's the wrong ambition. Sustaining a producer means keeping him exactly where he is. The dryer, the agronomy program, committing to year two — that's what actually making the producer and the coffee better looks like. That plot is now Finca Primer Paso — “First Step Farm.”

The trees on our plot are young — they were just two years old when we signed on, and coffee trees need about three before they produce real fruit. So our first harvest, picked in November 2025, was tiny: the trees' first fruit and the farm's first crop at once. We processed it as a natural anaerobic, and every ounce — all 48 kilograms of it — came to Stuart.

Young trees make bright, acidic coffee, so we roast Primer Paso with an extended Maillard phase to build sweetness into the cup — the way we describe it around the shop is “grapefruit with sugar on it.” We fire a roast only when there are enough pre-orders to fill a 12-pound batch, refining the profile a little each time — and we're already halfway through the harvest. It's the only place in the world you can taste this land.

Owning (kind of) a farm means more than cashing in a harvest. For year two of the five-year agreement we brought in Sandra Milena Tamayo Zapata — an agricultural engineer (Ingeniera Agropecuaria), environmental management specialist and Q Grader who works both sides of the craft: she walks the field rows as an agronomist, then roasts, rests, and scores the farm's samples herself at the cupping table.

Together we agreed on a full soil-testing and cupping program for Primer Paso:

This is where it gets real. Sandra's first technical visit found a farm fighting an intense dry season and a fresh outbreak of coffee leaf rust — and Andrés already installing a simple, low-cost irrigation system, something almost unheard of in Colombian coffee. She also made the smart call to postpone new soil sampling: the field had just been fertilized and limed, which would have skewed the results. We'd rather wait and measure the truth than rush and fool ourselves.

The irrigation system is settled too. Sandra costed Andrés' design against her own — pump, mobile sprinklers, the actual water the trees need — and we went with her lower-cost specification. Enough water to carry the plot through a dry season, without oversizing the system or pulling more water than it needs.

By September she had the picture: a sandy-loam soil, 58% sand, draining fast and holding little water, running acidic at pH 4.9 with high aluminium and low calcium. The answer isn't more fertilizer — it's organic matter. Coffee pulp, a natural compost carrying mycorrhizae and trichoderma, and well-stabilised poultry manure, worked into the rows to rebuild the structure of the soil itself. She costed it honestly, too: applying the same rate across the whole farm would run to 16,500 kg of material, which she told us plainly was not economically viable. We'd rather have an agronomist who says that than one who sells us the bigger number.

Then October happened. The soil and foliar samples went to the lab on 1 October, and on 15 October Sandra sent through a twelve-page technical follow-up on the results — the numbers the whole plan has been waiting on. Andrés bought the fertiliser the same day and started putting it down. By the 16th he was mixing the blend by hand: no single product matched what the soil analysis called for, so several had to be bought and combined. He has also started a small trial lot with washed coffee. We will post the laboratory report here as soon as we have it in a form we can publish.

• May 2025
  The handshake
  Capital for the mechanical dryer in exchange for the trees on one plot, five years.
• November 2025
  First harvest
  The trees' first fruit, processed as a natural anaerobic.
• Spring 2026
  Primer Paso lands in Stuart
  Weekly release waves as we dial in the roast.
• June 2026
  Year two begins
  Sandra's agronomy program starts — our commitment to the land itself.
• July 15, 2026
  First technical farm visit
  Drought and leaf-rust response, irrigation install, baseline report.
• July 22, 2026
  First cupping results are in
  Our natural lot scored beautifully — plus a wild banana-leaf fermentation experiment. Score sheets below.
• August 2026
  We buy the whole harvest
  Luna Azul, Red Sunset and Purple Honey — every bag grown on Andrés' own land, contracted through Algrano.
• September 2026
  Irrigation design decided
  Two specifications costed side by side; we went with Sandra's lower-cost option.
• October 1, 2026
  Soil and foliar samples go to the lab
  Sent to the National University of Colombia in Medellín to turn the soil plan into numbers.
• October 15, 2026
  Laboratory results come back
  A twelve-page technical follow-up on the soil analysis. Andrés buys the fertiliser the same day and begins applying it.
• October 16, 2026
  The blend goes on
  No single product matched the soil plan, so several were bought and mixed by hand. A small washed-coffee trial starts alongside it.
• Today — 21 October 2026
  595 kg at origin, awaiting a vessel
  Estimated arrival at Dupuy, Jacksonville — 16 November 2026.

The washed lot from the same trees is finished and cupped. Sandra scored it 84.00 on 21 September — orange, toasted almonds and peanut butter, a citric acidity, a light body. Cupping it beside the natural is how we start separating what comes from the land from what comes from the process. The same sheet grades the green coffee and counts 21 quakers per 100 grams, which points at picking and sorting rather than at the soil — the kind of number we would rather publish than tidy away. And the experiments have started, including a semi-washed lot fermented with banana leaves, which carry wild yeasts and lactic-acid bacteria of their own.

It all comes back to that farm of his own. Fewer trees, all his, means Andrés can pour everything into the craft he moved there to master: processing. Every lot is a laboratory — anaerobics, co-ferments, wild fermentations like the banana-leaf experiment below — all in service of one goal: becoming one of the top producers in the world in experimental processing methods. And Primer Paso gets to grow up right alongside him.

Year one was our plot's first fruit — 48 kilograms, and that was the whole of it. Year two is a different scale. We bought Andrés' entire 2026 harvest from his own farm. Not a lot, not a selection. Everything his own trees grew.

So Primer Paso is no longer the only coffee we get from this land. Three more came with it: Luna Azul, the black honey that started all of this. Red Sunset, semi-washed. Purple Honey, a sugar-cane ferment. Seventeen bags between them — 595 kilograms of green coffee, all of it bound for one small roastery in Stuart, Florida.

To be precise about what that does and doesn't mean: Andrés also buys cherry from neighbouring farms and processes it on site — that's a real part of what he does, and that coffee goes to other roasters. What we have is everything grown on his own farm. We are the only ones receiving it.

It matters more than it sounds. A producer who sells cherry is paid for cherry. A producer who sells a finished lot he grew and processed himself keeps both shares. Committing to the whole harvest up front is what lets Andrés plan a season instead of spending it looking for buyers.

There's no importer's offer list in this story. We buy direct from Andrés, with our partners at Unblended on the ground in Colombia, and Algrano moving the coffee — the sourcing platform that handles the logistics, paperwork and shipping so a roastery our size can buy a named farmer's crop directly instead of picking from a warehouse list. It lands at Dupuy in Jacksonville, then comes down the coast to us.