Colombia | Beto Naravez Papayo Anaerobic
Beto started farming coffee at 13 years old.
Not as a hobby. Not as a school project. He managed a plot his mother trusted him with, bought more trees with what he earned, and parcel by parcel — with no formal education and no safety net — built something worth being proud of. He eventually bought his uncle's farm outright. That's the whole origin story. No investors. No inheritance. Just a kid who decided coffee was worth the work and never stopped believing it.
In 2015, Beto entered the Yara Championship of Huila and took second place. That moment changed something. He realized he didn't just want to grow coffee — he wanted to grow exceptional coffee. He joined the Guacharos group shortly after, reconnecting with leader Edilma Piedrahita from a previous association, and found a community that matched his ambitions.
The farm we're sourcing from — Finca Buenos Aires Nuevo, because Beto sold the original and named the new one the same thing, which is exactly the kind of move we respect — sits at 1550 MASL in the highlands of Huila. He's planted pink bourbon, bourbon sidra, ombligón, F6, cenicafé, and red caturra across four hectares. Throughout the plot, 400 cachingo shade trees drop leaves rich in organic matter and protect the soil and coffee trees from heat — a lesson last summer's brutal temperatures drove home hard. Orange and lemon trees round out the canopy. This isn't accidental biodiversity. It's intentional stewardship.
He also has a 1.5 hectare plot in Diamante at 1600 MASL with ombligón trees. And he's already eyeing a third plot at 1750 MASL — sidra, chiroso, laurina, maybe wush wush — if the financing comes together. The man has a plan. He always has.
This is where it gets interesting.
Beto starts with ripe cherries, hand-sorted in a large attic above his processing facility. He floats them in water treated with sodium metabisulfite to remove overripes and disinfect. From there, the cherries go into closed — but not airtight — Grain Pro bags for a 36-hour cherry fermentation. Shorter than his pink bourbon, intentionally. Beto says the papayo amarillo carries more natural sweetness and needs less time for the sugars to break down. He's paying attention at that level of detail.
After de-pulping, the coffee goes into sealed plastic bags placed inside plastic barrels — canecas — wrapped in cellophane with a black lid and off-gassing tube for a proper airtight seal. Another 48 hours of fermentation. The plastic bags are a deliberate choice: Beto finds the large barrels nearly impossible to clean properly, so he keeps the coffee separated and controlled.
Then comes the thermal shock. He washes with an ecowasher using hot water at 45–50 degrees Celsius — a deliberate technique Beto says "seals" the seed and locks the sugars inside. The coffee then dries under shade in an upper canopy dryer for roughly three weeks.
This is not a farmer following a recipe. This is someone who has spent decades learning exactly what each decision does to what ends up in your cup.
Our trader partner Shared Source paid 4,350,000 Colombian pesos per carga directly to Beto for this lot — transferred straight to the association's bank account upon receipt of parchment at the mill. They covered transport from Bruselas to the mill. Shared Source are farmgate purchasers, paying in full, in local currency, directly to producers upon delivery. No middlemen taking a cut. No external financing inflating the margins.
You know what you paid. Beto knows what he received. That's the whole point.