Damián Bolaños: three hectares, twenty years of walking, and a first coffee in Europe

Damián grew up in Kennedy, a small neighbourhood on the edge of San Agustín at the foot of the mountains. While he was at school his parents ran the family coffee farm, and he joined them at weekends and in the holidays.

He describes the day like this:

"We would leave the house, my parents, my brother Yoiner, and our dogs at 6AM, packed with bags of food, and arrive at the farm a little before 8AM to begin work. By 5PM, we would begin the walk back, returning home at night."

Two hours there, two hours back, with the dogs. He lived that for close to twenty years.

Trying other things

After finishing school he looked for a way to be financially independent and put something into the household. He did a year in a supermarket in San Agustín, went back to the farm, found the work uninspiring, and then took a job with an agrochemical company selling fertiliser.

That job turned out to be the education. It sent him around Huila, onto a lot of farms, where he picked up how other people grew coffee. His parents and siblings ran the family farm while he travelled, and he brought what he learned back to it.

He also brought back money. He put it into labour and inputs for the farm, and he bought a motorcycle, the only vehicle the family had.

Moving onto the farm

They were still walking to work every day. So in 2015 the family moved onto the farm at La Muralla, improvising a small living space and a kitchen, and building a beneficio so they could depulp and ferment their own coffee instead of borrowing a neighbour's.

They were betting that if they got organised and stayed at it, things would improve.

Two years at half price

While the infrastructure was going up, they had no way to finish their own coffee, so they sold it en verde, depulped and wet, to local intermediaries. That normally fetches about 50% of the day's market price. The alternative was selling to neighbours, who would dry it and sell it under their own name.

Two years of that. It's the part of the story most producer profiles leave out, and it's the part that explains why the rest of it matters.

In 2017 a friend invited him to enter a cupping contest and auction called Best of Huila. Their coffee placed in the top fifteen out of three hundred lots.

The exporter, and being dropped

That contest introduced him to a coffee exporter. He started working for them part time in a support role, learned a lot, and got the chance to sell his coffee internationally for the first time.

He worked for them diligently for several years, and then found himself on the outside with no explanation of why, and no idea what would happen to his coffee.

Monkaaba

He approached Monkaaba in late 2022. After a few conversations the team took him on as an apprentice sample roaster in the lab and agreed to keep selling his coffee internationally.

He's a long-standing family friend of Esnaider Ortega Gomez and Didier Ortega, who run Monkaaba, and circumstances brought them back into each other's lives.

He now also does field support for a small group of farmers out near Tarqui, helping them with post-harvest processing and how to store their parchment. And he's in the cupping lab regularly, tasting his own coffee as he changes his processing, which is a harder discipline than it sounds and the only reliable way to improve.

As the people who work with him put it, he understands that recognition and real value are earned through action and perseverance.

This lot is only his second delivered to the group, and the first coffee of his ever sold in Europe.

How the coffee is made

Cherries are collected every two weeks and floated.

Then a whole-cherry fermentation of 15 to 18 hours, depulping, and a dry fermentation of another 36 to 38 hours. The seeds are washed clean of mucilage and left to drain in the tanks for six hours before going into the solar dryer for 18 to 20 days.

Adding those up, this coffee spends the better part of two and a half days fermenting before it starts drying, and the better part of three weeks drying after that.

About Monkaaba

Monkaaba is based in San Agustín and led by Esnaider Ortega Gomez with a group of other growers who have spent years selling their coffee as specialty. Many of them have a loose or direct connection to the Los Naranjos group and wanted more autonomy over how their coffee is produced, marketed and sold.

The idea came out of Esnaider's decade working as a sample roaster and cupper. He kept seeing coffees from people he knew rejected on the strength of a single cupping session, with no explanation of why or what could be improved. What worried him most was how demotivating that is for someone trying to get into the specialty market, and how many growers must be getting overlooked as a result.

So Monkaaba does two things. It looks for a market that pays properly, and it invests in growers' knowledge and skill so they can get there on their own terms. In practice that means weekly cupping sessions open to any producer who wants their samples evaluated, and an open invitation to come and cup alongside him.

In his own words:

"This last year has seen a very unique change in my life. After producing coffee with my family for many years, I decided to focus my efforts not only in producing and marketing our coffees but I wanted to go further with a group of friends... where we as small producers have been like instruments for companies, big or small, where they are only trying to protect their own interests while we're left to carry a very high percentage of the risks."