HACIENDA CASA BLANCA

Many years ago, Liliana Caballero Rojas made the bold move to leave her job, purchase a farm, and focus her full attention on coffee producing. She now oversees an incredible smallholding with great natural biodiversity where she grows incredible coffee.  

When we visited Liliana in April 2022, we were impressed by the great forest that surrounded her land offering important biodiversity as well as abundant nearby water sources, including rivers, streams and even waterfalls. The attention to detail, strict production processes and an obvious care for the craft shone through as we explored her plantation. 

Like most producers of the very best Colombian coffee beans, Liliana only harvests cherries by hand when they reach their optimal ripeness, preventing unripe beans from influencing the quality of the final batch. This work, together with other quality control processes and fermentations, is no doubt very labour and resource intensive, yet, Liliana is committed to doing whatever is necessary to ensure that the final result is something to be proud of. 

Today, one of the biggest challenges Liliana faces is climate change and the knock on effect it has on production. Expressing her concern, she told us “there’s been a huge change in the weather patterns due to climate change. Before, we were able to predict which time of the year would be the wet or the dry season. If we knew when we could expect rain we could plan around this. Nowadays, these cycles are so unpredictable, and this has a huge (and negative) impact on the production of coffee”.