Fredi and Jaime Ortega: one hectare, fifteen years of building it, and a first microlot
Fredi Ortega's life has been quiet and close to home. He went to school in the Sevilla area until seventh grade and spent his afternoons on the farm, mostly looking after the calves and getting feed ready for the cows.
Here's a detail that says more about smallholder coffee than most statistics do. At the start, the family had no coffee to drink.
How one hectare gets assembled
At 15 he started working alongside his parents to bring money in. Three years later his father, Isidro, gave him a small plot of his own, and he put 500 caturra trees in it while carrying on with the family's work.
He tried leaving once. He went north in Huila to work as a travelling picker, spent time in Teruel and Pital, didn't like what he found there, and came home, where he felt more like himself.
At 20 Don Isidro handed him another plot. Another 1,200 caturra trees went in. Six years after that he inherited one more piece of land, which finished the family plot off. He still works it with his parents and his brother Jaime.
One hectare. Built over roughly fifteen years, in three pieces.
The association years, and quitting
Fredi and Jaime got into specialty coffee in 2018, when they took over their father's role at the Los Naranjos Association. Don Isidro retired after ten years there. Up to that point their coffee had gone into the Los Naranjos blends, mixed in with other coffee from the region, which is a perfectly respectable place for coffee to end up and also completely anonymous.
At the association they learned good agricultural practice, fermentation and drying.
Then in 2020 they gave up on specialty entirely. They couldn't hit the characteristics the market wanted and didn't know why. The answer turned out to be the drying rooms, which had almost no ventilation, a problem invisible from the inside unless somebody tells you.
Somebody did. Other producers and friends made some recommendations, and they rebuilt the drying setup with spacers to get air moving through it. The coffee got better immediately. So, they mention, did their own health, which is worth sitting with for a second: they had been working in those rooms.
Getting to a lot with a name on it
Their cousin Gildardo Ortega is the one who kept pushing, and who got them properly involved in specialty. In 2022 samples from the farm went to the Monkaaba project for cupping. The results came back good, which was all the encouragement anyone needed.
This lot is the first microlot sold under Fredi's own name. He's proud of it, and he's clear about who it's for: his family, and his father, who worked at this for years without ever getting the recognition.
How the coffee is made
The trees get picked every three weeks, with two weeks of rest in between so the plants can recover.
Some of the plots sit a long way from the mill, so Fredi loads the cherry onto a horse and walks it there. Thirty-five minutes out, thirty-five minutes back.
At the mill the cherry is floated, then left to ferment whole in a majolica hopper for 24 hours. After pulping it goes into majolica tanks for a dry fermentation of another 36 hours. Then it's washed, drained for an hour, and moved to the dryer for 18 to 20 days.
That's a long, patient process for a one-hectare farm, and it's the part where the rebuilt drying setup earns its money.
About Monkaaba
Monkaaba is a group based in San Agustín, led by Esnaider Ortega Gomez along with other growers who have spent years trying to sell their coffee as specialty. Many of them have some connection to the Los Naranjos group and wanted more control over how their coffee is produced, marketed and sold.
The aim is two things at once: find growers in the area a market that pays properly, and invest in their knowledge and skill so the improvement sticks.
