Rubiro Burbano

On the southern part of the department of Huila lies the municipality of Pitalito, full of coffee farms and amazing scenery. In the township of Bruselas, in Pitalito, Rubiro Burbano has his farm, El Cedro, where he lives with his wife, Rosalba Sotelo. The name given to the farm by him and his father, comes from the number of cedar trees found in the area. He has learned about coffee from a young age when he helped his parents, and they started teaching him what they knew. Eventually, they gave him a parcel of the farm so that he could start his own coffee production. With specialty coffee, he began in 2015 motivated by his thirst of knowledge to learn more about coffee, eagerness to improve his cup quality to gain recognition for his coffee, and achieve better prices. In this journey, he has had the chance to share experiences with like-minded coffee producers, visit other farms to learn, and attend workshops. At the farm he works alongside his family, and sometimes has the help of neighbors. Coffee has been paramount in sustaining his family and providing them with a good quality of life.

Rubiro starts his coffee process with a good manual cherry picking and then takes them to the wet mill at the farm. There, the cherries are pulped without water and left to ferment in a ceramic tank for a period of 48 hours without water Afterwards, the coffee is washed twice to clean it from defective beans. Following this, Rubiro picks the coffee in bags where it is left for 12 hours to drain the excess liquid. Then, the coffee is spread in the raised covered patios, where it is raked several times per day to guarantee a homogenous drying. It takes from 20 to 25 days, depending on the climate, for the coffee to reach its ideal humidity point