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Felipe is originally from Tolima region and the 1st generation of coffee growers in his family. He started to get involved in coffee when he was 16 years old as his brother was working for a coffee exporter at that time so Felipe would go with him and visit some coffee producers in different regions. As he grows up, he decides to do his studies in Agro Industrial Engineering in Cauca which took him away from the coffee industry for a while, meanwhile, his brother continued working in coffee, buys some land in Antioquia and later on encourages Felipe to be part of the business. 

He explains that at the beginning it was so hard to start growing coffee specially because they were trying to grow 80,000 coffee plants completely organic and from scratch which brought a loss of 80% of the trees. Today they have 25,000 coffee trees treated with 50% organic material and 50% with chemicals but slowly doing the transition to a fully organic coffee plantation. 

Felipe explains that the Chiroso variety became popular in Urrao, Antioquia thanks to Carmen Montoya Cup of Excellence winner back in 2014 who named this coffee trees “Chiroso” as its leafs looked different. Felipe explains that Carmen realised how productive these trees were so she decided to grow it in her farm and became very popular in Urrao among many coffee growers including Felipe who also found his profile to be very appealing for his clients. “Physically the Chiroso coffee tree looks like a Caturra tree but the beans are quite long like a Bourbon variety” he explains. 

This was the best argument to start finding ways to position this rare variety and that’s why Felipe decides to compete this year for the first time in Cup of Excellence with the aim to make this variety become renowned among coffee professionals which surprisingly got the 1st place in the contest, something that Felipe and his brother never thought of and has been for sure a great achievement and reward to their hard work. 

Before the pandemic, Felipe had high expectations of selling this coffee to new clients this year, but due to the circumstances, many sales got cancelled and they even had to decrease the price in order to keep selling his coffees.