Edgar Sosa Garcia

On the skirt of the central Cordillera of Colombia, in the department of Tolima, there is a municipality named Anzoategui on the top of a mountain with its beautiful church overlooking the town. In this area, on the rural area, we meet Edgar Sosa and wife, Flor Alba Rojas at their farm Mesopotamia. Edgar is originally from the region of Cesar in Colombia but around 1997 he moved to Tolima to look for better opportunities. There, he started working as a cherry picker and met her wife. During that time, he eventually landed a job administrating a coffee farm, around 2004. Here, he learned a lot about drying and processing from the owners of the farm, as they were in specialty coffee and sometimes sent their coffees to contests. At this farm, Edgar had some coffee trees that were his own and he processed the way he had learned, and eventually he bought his own farm with his wife. From the beginning with his farm, he has focused on good quality coffee as he strives and likes to do things the best way possible, he knows if the coffee is not good, he will lose money. Although there might be bad times or coffee rejected, he believes in striving and being consistent to always achieve a good quality coffee. To do this, he works in the farm with his wife and eldest child who helps him, and who is the most involved of the five that he has. These years he has been proud of his farm because of the good volume of coffee the plants have had, and his current challenge is to improve the quality of his coffee. On the future, Edgar would like to buy more land to be able to give a piece of land to each of his kids so that they also can start their dream.

To process the coffee Edgar starts with a good picking of coffee cherries which are placed inside plastic bags and left for one or two days for an in- cherry fermentation. Afterwards, the cherries are pulped and fermented in tiled covered tanks from 20 to 36 hours, and then the coffee is washed. Subsequently, it is taken to the drying beds where they will be for a period of 5 days if it‘s very sunny up to 20 days when it’s cloudy and raining.