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

When Andrés's uncle passed away, the family situation around Villa Lucía changed, and Andrés lost access to the land where Luna Azul was born. He still had coffee trees he could work — but no way to process the cherries himself. 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 the lots that made Luna Azul special.

The producer behind one of our favorite coffees on the planet suddenly couldn't make his own coffee. That didn't sit right with us.

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 he needed most to run his own operation. In exchange, Andrés set aside one hectare of coffee trees for The Roasted Record for five years, 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 hectare is now Finca Primer Paso — “First Step Farm.”

The trees on our hectare 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) and specialty-coffee professional 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.

• May 2025
  The handshake
  Capital for the mechanical dryer in exchange for one hectare, 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.
• Today
  The next step: the whole farm
  We're exploring buying Andrés's entire production — roughly 2,000 kg a year — not just our hectare.

Next up: Andrés is finishing a washed lot from the same trees, so we can cup it against the natural and learn what's terroir and what's process. 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.

And the biggest step yet: as of today we're investigating buying Andrés's entire farm production — approximately 2,000 kilograms a year. One hectare taught us what this partnership can do. Extending it across the whole farm would mean every tree Andrés grows gets the same investment — and every cup we serve comes from land we help care for.