Every can of Drift is a blend of exactly two places: a ridge above Pitalito in Huila, Colombia, and a cooperative of smallholders in the Kebele Hills of Sidama, Ethiopia. We buy from both at a fixed price agreed before harvest, and we have visited every year since 2021. This is where the eighteen hours start.
Don Álvaro Muñoz took over the farm from his mother in 1988 and has planted nothing but Caturra and a little Pink Bourbon since. Forty hectares on a north-facing ridge, shaded by guamo trees, picked by hand over eleven weeks each spring.
The washed lot gives Drift its body: dark chocolate, a long toffee finish, the thing that makes the Original taste like coffee rather than juice.
Los Naranjos · HuilaA single family farm on a ridge above Pitalito. Don Álvaro, his daughter Camila, and twelve pickers who come back every season. Washed process, patio-dried.
Kebele Hills · SidamaThree hundred and twelve smallholder families around Bensa, each with a garden of a few hundred heirloom trees. One washing station, one drying field, one very good accountant named Tsion.
Sidama coffee is mostly grown in gardens rather than farms: a few hundred trees behind a house, under enset and false banana, picked by the family that lives there. The cooperative pools the cherries at a single washing station above Bensa, where they are sorted by hand and dried whole on raised beds for three weeks. The natural process is what gives Drift its black cherry and that faint, improbable note of bergamot.
Parchment coffee leaves the farm in sixty-kilo bags in February. It rests at the mill in Pitalito for three weeks, is hulled and graded, then travels fourteen hours by truck to the port of Buenaventura.
Each lot is roasted separately, rested for thirty-six hours, then blended sixty-forty. The grind is coarse, like sea salt, and the steep is eighteen hours in filtered Melbourne rainwater at four degrees.
The brew is filtered through paper and then cloth, dosed with a whisper of nitrogen for a soft head, and sealed in a slim 250 millilitre can. We ship on Mondays, so the morning you open it is never far from the morning we made it.
