Gustavo Silva - Colombia

The Day We Stepped Through the Portal

Some places you visit, and some you step through. The Nasa We’sx reservation in Gaitania, Tolima was the second kind. Distrust of outsiders runs high there, even among Colombians, so being welcomed in was a gift built on relationships far deeper than ours. Gustavo Silva Iter is a community leader, artisan, father, and third-generation coffee grower. He spent the better part of an hour telling us about his violent childhood and his family’s forced migration over the mountains, all with an ear to ear smile, while we ate corn and yuca soup. Then he took us through the jungle to a waterfall, where we prayed, set intentions, and just sat. Much of that day was holy and we’re keeping it that way. What we can say is that we sell coffee, but people are the foundation, and the energy behind this one is healing. His community’s history runs deep too. In 1996, the Nasa We’sx elders of his vereda signed a peace treaty with the local FARC guerrillas, twenty years before the national agreement.

Finca La Guadualosa sits between 1,730 and 1,840 masl in the temperate forest of Gaitania, surrounded by towering heliconias and yarumos. Gustavo’s sister and her husband live on and manage the farm, close to their parents’ land, where his mother tends 40-year-old Typica trees. Of the four organic hectares, two are in production, grown with help from eight family members and ten local pickers who hand-select every cherry during the main harvest. The varieties are Colombia, F6, F8, and Caturra. Cherries ferment in bioreactors for 20 hours, are depulped, ferment another 20 hours, get rinsed, and then dry for 20 to 30 days on parabolic greenhouse solar dryers. This is the first time Gustavo’s coffees have been separated from the community lot and sold in the US, so don’t sleep on it.