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Café Mesa de los Santos isn't trying to save the world. It is simply trying, with much success, to produce the best possible coffee for today's consumer. With this simple goal in mind, Oswaldo Acevedo, fourth-generation farm owner, along with a crew of dedicated workers, has transformed a 130-year-old family-owned coffee farm into a forward-minded producer that is, indeed, having an effect on the quality and sustainability of the coffee industry as a whole. Accompany me on a journey to Mesa de los Santos, where the cup is sweeter and the future is brighter.
A Not-So-Brief History
Legend has it that, more than 150 years ago, Monsignor Francisco Romero (born 1810, died 1874) discovered Mesa de los Santos, a blessed land in the beautiful northeastern Andes of Colombia. It is said that the priest ordered sinners to repent by planting coffee. The land soon began to produce coffee so special that Father Romero is said to have declared it worthy of being served at the "Mesa de los Santos "--the "Table of Saints."
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Workers of the Farm
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Café Mesa de los Santos was founded in 1872 by Telmo J. Diaz, Oswaldo Acevedo's great-grandfather. The hacienda is located in the town of Los Santos, nearly 25 miles south of Bucaramanga, today a city of about 1 million. As a fourth-generation coffee grower, Acevedo took over the family coffee business in 1995. He transformed the farm's conventional production to 100-percent organic, began planting new coffee and shade trees, registered the Café Mesa de los Santos brand and established a distribution channel. Acevedo, unlike most Colombian coffee producers, exports the farm's coffee himself rather than through the Colombian Coffee Federation. Acevedo possesses a keen sense of the U.S. and European specialty coffee markets and has built a strong relationship with Emeryville, Calif.-based coffee importer, Royal Coffee, Inc. He has also been a presenter at the Specialty Coffee Association of America's Conference & Exhibition, speaking on "Restoring Habitat Through Coffee Farming."
Natural Resources Abound
As Acevedo puts it, Café Mesa de los Santos' growing success is due to its abundance of natural resources, including its efficient, dedicated team. Fermín Alba, farm manager, has lived and worked around coffee all his life. He has been working for Mesa de los Santos for more than 35 years. Highly regarded by the workers and their families, Alba is an expert in organic coffee-growing methods.
His wife, Miriam, was born on the hacienda and is now its gracious hostess and too-humble chef. These two are at the forefront of the farm's quality, productivity and personality. Any visitor to Mesa de los Santos is guaranteed to be charmed by their warmth and to quickly become addicted (as I did) to Miriam's cooking.
Fernanda Riaño, Miriam's niece, tracks farm production statistics and manages the onsite weather station, and José Antonio Martinez is the company's full-time cupper.
Café Mesa de los Santos employs five full-time area managers who, like farm manager Alba, live in onsite homes. Each resident area manager, or viviente, supervises a crew that performs various duties, from coffee planting, pruning and composting to irrigating, weeding and coffee picking. The farm employs more than 100 workers year-round, with more than twice that number employed during peak harvest. The area managers and their families receive free housing and utilities as well as land on which to cultivate their own food, which includes beef, poultry, yucca and bananas.
Because of the hacienda's long-running, progressive programs for its workers and their families, Café Mesa de los Santos boasts some of the trade's hardest-working, most dedicated workers. This, Acevedo believes, is a key factor in the quality of the coffee. In 1950, the farm built a church for its workers and their families--this church was recently expanded with the construction of a much larger church and rectory and now serves hundreds of workers, their families and neighbors.
In 1964, a school was built for the children of the farm's workers. In 2000, Royal Coffee, Inc., and Royal Coffee New York, Inc., donated five brand-new, Internet-ready Compaq computers to the school. Café Mesa de los Santos has also donated a library and constructed an addition to the school, which currently serves more than 500 students. This number includes children of the farm's workers as well as students from elsewhere in the region, who are attracted to the school because of its abundant resources.
The farm compensates its workers with a base pay that is up to 65 percent higher than the country's minimum wage. Each coffee picker is also paid above and beyond the base, depending on the quantity and quality of coffee he or she picks. Café Mesa de los Santos also provides healthcare and dental benefits to all of its workers and their families, disability insurance, pension and an education allowance for children.
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Colombian coffee hacienda where everything was done by hand and with ultimate regard for the land that helped produce one's livelihood. "The old ways were better, we believe," says Acevedo. "My great-grandfather never used chemicals to grow his coffee, so neither do we." Café Mesa de los Santos was certified organic in 1998. The labor-intensive practice of organic coffee farming at Mesa de los Santos has vastly improved the land's ecology and has resulted in a higher-quality product year after year.
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The beautiful farm
of Mesa de los Santos.
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That's not to say the farm does not rely on technology. At its estacion climatica, weather patterns are painstakingly monitored.
From dry and wet thermometers that track daily high and low temperatures and a thermohydrographer that continuously graphs temperature and humidity to a heliograph that measures solar hours and intensity, high-tech equipment is put to good use at Café Mesa de los Santos. In addition to the above, rainfall, evaporation and wind are also measured three times daily, and graphed over time. Three times a day, Riaño records the information output by the various devices.
Composted chicken manure has proven to be an excellent natural "fertilizer" for the farm's land. In the early 1970s, Acevedo's uncle, Julio, constructed three poultry houses for the purpose of supplying natural material (manure) for compost. The farm now has its own composting facility. Located in poultry country, it now has a specialized crew and a truck dedicated to removing chicken manure from nearby chicken houses and bringing the truckloads to the farm's compost center. Not only does this help the farm, but it helps local chicken growers with the problem and expense of disposing of the manure. The chicken manure (mixed with what was a bed of rice husks) is combined with post-wet-process coffee mucilage and pulp.
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To further promote healthy growth, the coffee trees are irrigated by hand--daily, during the dry season--by a crew of 12 workers. And in a further measure to ensure quality during harvest, hand-pickers are supplied with two containers, the second a smaller basket that allows a primary visual quality check to take place.
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 The school, built in 1964.
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Quality control does not stop when the ripe cherries have been picked from the trees. Mesa de los Santos utilizes three individual float tanks to separate out beans of lower density. Once the coffee has dried (utilizing dry coffee husks, rather than wood, as fuel), the beans rest on wooden beds called trojas in an aging process that takes three to four weeks and is believed to bring out more of the coffee's desirable characteristics. Pre-shipment storage is also quality-managed in a facility that holds the coffee under ideal conditions--around 59 degrees Fahrenheit at 65 percent humidity.
Every batch of coffee that is picked and processed is cupped at the hacienda's onsite cupping facility by its own full-time cupper, José Antonio Martinez. Here, tens of thousands of baby coffee and shade trees are cultivated using highly effective, natural methods. Between rows, herbs including lemon balm and mint are planted as natural insecticides. |
| Every 15 days, a mixture called purin is applied to the seedlings. This concoction contains leaves from many of the shade trees and plants that are cultivated on the farm that act as natural fertilizers, insecticides and fungicides. These are mixed with cattle manure, naturally growing groundcover, yeast and molasses to introduce and feed desirable microorganisms that help the plants grow healthier. |
 The farm's onsite weather station.
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Consumer Appeal
Café Mesa de los Santos boasts all the characteristics sought by health-wise, environmentally aware and socially conscious coffee consumers. But what the coffee consistently offers in addition to these "earth-friendly" traits is great taste--the greatest motivator of consumer purchases. Thompson Owen is the owner and cupper for Sweet Maria's, an Emeryville, Calif.-based company that sells green coffee to home roasters. |
 The farm's nursery.
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"The coffee is very complex, which our customers notice and appreciate. Café Mesa de los Santos is one of the only coffees I have found that, from year to year, is consistently and reliably excellent," says Owen. In addition, the coffee is surprisingly sweet in the cup (even for someone such as myself, who admittedly drinks her coffee with cream and sugar).
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A cupping report from Royal Coffee described the coffee as "Sweet, floral, slightly fruity and citrus. Very well-rounded, ideal as a stand-alone coffee."
Much of the coffee's sweetness may be attributed to the hacienda's location. Mesa de los Santos occupies a rare spot atop a plateau that rises above the Sogamoso and Manco Rivers near Chicamocha Canyon--considered Colombia's "Grand Canyon."
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Making purin
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The daily temperature differential (highs above 90 degrees Fahrenheit during the day, lows plummeting to below 40 degrees at night) is created by the noonday heat rising from the canyon and creating a high wind that runs across the plateau, quickly cooling the surrounding land (the farm). These daily fluctuations in temperature are considered very desirable among wine-grape and sugarcane producers because they result in a sweeter product. Acevedo believes this is a main contributor to the consistently sweet cup quality of the coffee that is produced by Mesa de los Santos; the weather station is helping to document, day by day, the validity of this belief.
The diversity of the farm is extraordinary, with much of it having been built--literally from the ground up--on reclaimed pastureland. Not only is the farm comprised of low-density cafetales hosting caturra and bourbon varieties of arabica coffee, but there are, today, 48 varieties of shade trees established throughout the farm--more than 43,250 shade trees total--from the temporary shade (and nourishment for wildlife) of the banana to the intermediate shade and wonderful mulch created by the fallen leaves of the nine varieties of guamo (inga) to the beautiful, feathery, umbrella-like canopy of the galapo. Other shade-tree varieties include cedar, guava, oak, orange, viburnum and walnut. The shade trees provide invaluable protection against soil erosion and groundwater run-off, as well as a rich habitat for wildlife. The company's awe-inspiring dedication to sustainability as it relates to quality is put in perspective when one sees existing coffee plants being removed to make room for the planting of new shade trees.
The biodiversity that has resulted from Mesa de los Santos' organic farming, forestation and soil-improvement techniques is beyond impressive. The multi-layered shade of the farm is an absolute haven for resident and migratory birds. The coffee boasts the coveted "Certified Shade-grown, Bird-friendly®" seal, awarded by the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center. Café Mesa de los Santos is currently the only Colombian coffee to obtain this certification. Acevedo describes the farm's coexistence with its wildlife as ideal: "Although the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center requires a minimum of 10 species of shade trees, we feel that planting even more varieties provides better habitat not only for birds but for bats, reptiles and amphibians. We find the wildlife on the farm to be the best insurance against pests and disease--we have seen birds eating harmful leaf-eating worms, for example. We consider the wildlife on the farm to be beautiful, productive workers that require little in return." The farm hosts 117 species of birds, including cowbirds, cuckoos, doves, falcons, finches, grebes, kingfishers, mockingbirds, orioles, owls, tanagers, thrushes, warblers, woodpeckers and wrens, as well as bats, frogs, snakes, honeybees and wasps, and salamanders.
Furthermore, Mesa de los Santos is funding a biannual biological research project, which evaluates the farm's biodiversity. Mesa de los Santos began its first ornithological count in 1999, conducted by Cenicafe's Conservation Biology Program, with a second count conducted in 2001 by biologist Victor H. Serrano. Last year, a third and much more in-depth study was conducted by professor Camilo Peraza, with his team of 15 post-graduate biology students from the prestigious Universidad Javeriana. At that time, 19 new bird species were found. The complete report, detailing the farm's birds, bats and reptiles will be published soon.
I cannot justly describe the beauty and ecological bounty that one encounters while visiting Mesa de los Santos. Helen Nicholas of Royal Coffee, Inc. sums up her thoughts: "Café Mesa de los Santos, environmentally, socially and in terms of quality, is an excellent model for the specialty coffee industry--it's a prime example of what coffee producers should strive to be." Mesa de los Santos invites any and all interested specialty coffee professionals to visit the hacienda, where a team of horses is ready to transport visitors through guided tours.
The fun and adventure of the tours, combined with the wonderful scenery, warm hospitality and heavenly food, is unparalleled. This trip to origin immerses visitors in the rich traditions of the farm and in the creation of " café de sabor divino "--"coffee of divine taste"--with hands-on coffee picking, purin mixing, processing and cupping. For more information, visit the company's Web site at www.cafemesadelossantos.com.
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