First up I just need to clarify: Sergio Aranda, Sergio Aranda, Sergio Aranda… I can’t stop calling this coffee Sergio Ramos, and I really must.
So Sergio’s the man behind this coffee, it's hands down one of the tastiest things we’ve ever tried. Whether it’s technically a co-ferment or not, well we’ll leave that in the wind.
Sergio Darío Aranda Gómez
Sergio grew up in coffee, as would have been fairly standard for a kid of coffee-growing parents in Huila through the 90s and 00s. His mother purchased Finca Anaya over 35 years ago and was herself part of a family with several generations of coffee-growing history. Sergio talks of learning “the art of processing” from a young age.
We don’t need to reach out for a blow-by-blow account of Sergio's childhood, and we can make some reasonable assumptions based on his age and location. Growing up in a coffee-producing family in the San Adolfo area, he would have been familiar with the instability of coffee prices and the challenges of getting coffee to market, as well as the wider insecurity created by political violence in the region. (Read the San Adolfo section at the bottom for more context on that.)
“Anaya is a family farm. It originally belonged to my mother. She bought the farm more than 35 years ago. Throughout that time, she grew very traditional coffees, always looking for a market that would allow her to make a living.”
By his late teens, Sergio would have been more than familiar with many aspects of coffee production. His family had spent decades producing fairly traditional coffee, but it wasn’t until his early twenties that he began to experience the industry beyond the farm. At 22, he got a job in a coffee warehouse, where he learned to cup and developed a keen interest in sensory analysis.
This must have been a fucking crazy time to work in a coffee warehouse in southern Huila. The region was beginning to emerge from some of its worst years of violence, while its coffee industry was undergoing a transformation of its own. Throughout the 2010s, producers in southern Huila were gaining international recognition, with new varieties, experimental processing techniques and increasingly distinctive coffees attracting attention from speciality buyers around the world.
Sergio's introduction to speciality coffee came through Andrés Guaca, another third-generation coffee producer from San Adolfo. Andrés was developing his own speciality project at Finca Guacobia, experimenting with varieties and fermentation techniques that represented a very different approach to the conventional coffee Sergio had grown up producing. Their friendship introduced Sergio to a wider network of Colombian coffee producers, including Felipe Arcila and Diego Samuel Bermúdez, and eventually opened the door to working in Cauca.
Sergio spent the next five years there, working alongside some of Colombia's most innovative producers and developing the technical knowledge that would later become central to his own project: controlled fermentation, processing, sensory evaluation and quality management.
So yeah, pretty classic Colombian super producer origin story here… it all starts to come together around 2023, with the relaunching of the family farm - Finca Anaya.
Finca Anaya
“I returned to Acevedo and started my project with new ideas, new varieties, supported by the great friends I'd made during that time.”
Sergio’s homecoming marked a period of considerable change for Finca Anaya.
The family farm sits at around 1,600 metres above sea level in the rural community of Siberia, San Adolfo, in southern Huila, where the Central and Eastern Cordilleras converge around the Colombian Massif. It's a landscape of dramatic topography and remarkably diverse microclimates, even by the standards of a country with a seemingly infinite variety of them.
The farm covers approximately 4.5 hectares, with native trees and fruit trees providing shade for the coffee growing beneath them. Just the perfect place to plant a load of mad varieties… so yeah, that's what he did. Pink Bourbon, Yellow Pacamara, Gesha, Ombligón, Sidra, Typica Mejorado, Orange Bourbon, Red Bourbon, Castillo, Colombia, Caturra. Yeah man, he's got all the hits.
Sergio also got to work implementing processing protocols similar to those he'd worked with in Cauca. His approach seems to be a more farm-level adaptation of the laboratory-led, highly technical fermentations we've come to expect from Diego Bermúdez. While there's nothing fundamentally different about the principles behind his processing, there's definitely a style emerging: big, fruit-forward fermentations, varied yeast cultures, locally available ingredients and slower solar drying, supplemented by mechanical drying where necessary. This guy produces loud coffees.
He's not done it alone. By 2025, Anaya had become a much more collaborative business. Dairo García, a coffee producer from Pitalito with experience in purchasing, sales and export logistics, joined Sergio as a business partner in late 2024, bringing valuable commercial expertise to the operation. Daniela Rodríguez also came on board to manage the finances, allowing Sergio to concentrate on production, processing and quality control.
They've also developed a close relationship with Cata Export, who we work with to source Anaya's coffees. Cata were among Sergio's earliest speciality buyers and have since become an important commercial partner, helping connect the farm with international roasters and competition baristas. Sergio speaks about them with genuine affection, crediting their support with opening doors that might otherwise have remained closed.
Processing
- Ripe coffee cherries are selectively harvested and sorted.
- Whole cherries undergo an initial 24-hour fermentation.
- The cherries are depulped, followed by a further 48-hour fermentation.
- The coffee undergoes a submerged fermentation using selected yeasts and a pre-fermented fruit mixture.
- Throughout fermentation, pH, electrical conductivity (EC), total dissolved solids (TDS) and Brix are monitored to control the process.
- The coffee undergoes a thermal treatment using water at 38°C, followed by a final wash at 20°C.
- The coffee is slowly dried until it reaches a final moisture content of 10–11.5%.
- The dried coffee is prepared for storage and export.
Impact
So Sergio does seem like a dude. He's explicitly trying to make sure his business is a force for good.
“We want to be a school. We want to be entrepreneurs who inspire and motivate more people to believe in coffee, to build businesses, to believe in their projects, and to understand that through the countryside and through coffee we can change our lives and move forward.”
That really resonates with us.
The wider impact of Finca Anaya is difficult to quantify at this stage, particularly as the business in its current form is only around four years old.
What we can say is that they're creating rural employment as their workforce grows, and building a business around collaboration, skills sharing and entrepreneurship. These aren't just nice ideas we've projected onto the project; they're things Sergio has explicitly identified as motivating factors behind his work.
I think we're likely to see a few protégés emerge from Anaya in the coming years, but we'll have to wait and see.
What we can say for certain is that Finca Anaya's coffees are now commanding prices that would have been difficult to imagine for the previous generation of producers.
San Adolfo - Context
San Adolfo is a rural coffee-growing community in southern Huila, within the municipality of Acevedo. The township is pretty typical of the region, a few streets with a square and a church in the centre, a population of around 2,000 nestled below beautiful hills. Today, San Adolfo is around ninety minutes from Pitalito, the nearest major town. During the 1990s and early 2000s, poor roads and disruption caused by Colombia's armed conflict would’ve made that distance feel much greater.
San Adolfo's location, close to the mountainous border with Caquetá, made it strategically important during Colombia's internal conflict. FARC guerrillas established a significant presence in the surrounding countryside, at times exercising considerable influence over local communities and challenging the authority of the Colombian state.
The conflict occasionally spilled directly into the town. In 1987, FARC guerrillas attacked the police station in San Adolfo's central square. They returned in September 2001, launching a major assault on the town and its police station, using improvised explosives made from gas cylinders. Several police officers were killed, and the attack left lasting damage to the community.
In 2023, Colombia's Victims Unit completed an official assessment of the harm suffered by San Adolfo as part of its collective reparation process. The investigation documented the lasting social, economic and cultural consequences of armed conflict in the area, spanning from 1984 into the early 2000s.
For those growing up and making a living in San Adolfo during this period, the challenges of rural life were compounded by the insecurity and disruption of the conflict. Despite this difficult history, coffee cultivation has remained an important part of the area's agricultural identity.
