A honey sweetness meets notes of apricot, golden raisin and panela, layered with cardamom spice and a bright citrus lift. A juicy, rounded cup with a lingering caramelised dried fruit finish.
Aponte sits high in northern Nariño, inside the municipality of El Tablón de Gómez, and it isn’t really a place you pass through on the way to somewhere else. It’s an indigenous reserve belonging to the Inga, a Quechua-descended community whose ancestors made the walk over the mountains from the Sibundoy valley in Putumayo in the sixteenth century. The path they used is still there. The reserve has its own language, its own governance under an elected indigenous governor, and its own guard.
Coffee here is a relatively recent chapter, and a deliberate one. The community turned to it as a way of rebuilding after decades that nearly cost them their land and their culture, and the quality arrived faster than anyone expected. Around 200 growers across several associations now farm here, and Aponte has gone from a name almost nobody in specialty coffee knew to one roasters actively seek out.
What they do with the honey process is the interesting bit. Cherries are picked ripe and pulped, but the sticky mucilage stays on the seed through drying. That’s the fussy middle ground between washed and natural, and it’s a process that punishes carelessness – too warm, too humid, too rushed, and you get ferment rather than fruit. Aponte’s growers have been working this way since 2017, keeping volumes small enough to give every lot proper attention. The cold, thin mountain air does the rest, and the result is a cup with the clarity of a washed coffee and a good deal more sweetness.
The variety is Caturra, a natural dwarf mutation of Bourbon and about as classically Colombian as it gets. Nothing exotic. Just a well-understood plant, grown carefully, processed with real attention.
- Country: Colombia
- Region: Aponte, El Tablón de Gómez, Nariño
- Producers: Approximately 200 smallholders across associations of the Inga Aponte reserve
- Variety: Caturra
- Altitude: 1,700 – 1,800 m.a.s.l.
- Processing: Honey