This complex, elegant but juicy cup starts with cherry cordial before a burst of white grape and then a squeeze of tangerine.
Pedro Flores' farm sits in the small colonia of Villa Rosario, a short drive east of Caranavi. He's part of Sol de la Mañana – the Rodriguez family's producer mentoring programme, which provides hands-on training in coffee agronomy to smallholders across the region. Through it, Pedro has learnt to replant his land more strategically and manage his plants with a consistency and rigour that simply wasn't common practice here before the programme existed.
To ensure only the ripest cherries make it off the tree, Sol de la Mañana producers typically do seven or eight harvesting passes across their plants throughout the season – far more than most producers anywhere in the world. It's labour-intensive work that yields smaller amounts each time, but the payoff is quality you can taste. The flip side is that each individual delivery ends up being quite small – too small, in most cases, to process as a standalone lot. So instead, cherry from the Villa Rosario producers is combined and processed together at the Rodriguez family's mill in Caranavi.
You might notice something unfamiliar in the processing details for this coffee: mosto washed. Here's what that means. Mosto is a Spanish word for fresh fruit juice – specifically before fermentation takes hold. It's the same root as the English winemaking term "must." In practice, the process works like this: two batches of coffee run in sequence. The first is depulped, fermented in a closed tank, then rinsed and sent to the drying beds as a standard washed lot. The liquid from that fermentation – the mosto – is carefully saved, with its pH and microbial activity monitored throughout. When the second batch is depulped, that live, already-fermenting juice is added directly to it. The active cultures give the fermentation an immediate head start, helping to break down the remaining pulp more efficiently and, it seems, encouraging the development of the complex, fruit-forward flavours that make these lots so distinctive.
- Country: Bolivia
- Region: Yungas
- Municipality: Caranavi
- Town: Copacabana
- Farm: Villa Rosario
- Altitude: 1,500 m.a.s.l.
- Farm size: 2 hectares
- Producer: Pedro Flores
- Varietal: Caturra & Catuai
- Processing: Mosto Washed
- ESPRESSO RECIPE
- Dry dose: 17.5g
Time: 30 - 32 sec
Wet weight: 36 g
FILTER RECIPE - Suggested method: V60
Dry dose: 15g
Water: 250ml/ 97°C
Time: 3 - 4 mins
We omniroast our beans to suit any brew method. To find the method that suits your kit, check out our Brew Guides.
Pedro Flores & Sol de la Manana
Pedro Flores has been growing coffee in the colonia of Villa Rosario his whole life. His farm, El Mirador – the lookout – spreads across around two hectares of steep terrain near Caranavi, planted with Caturra, Catuaí, and Typica. Like many families in the region, Pedro inherited his land young and spent years selling his coffee at the local market, where prices were low and reliability lower. That changed when he joined Sol de la Mañana in 2014. Before the programme, his yields had fallen to fewer than six bags per hectare. Today he's achieving around 30 – a fivefold increase that's transformed the economics of his farm entirely.
Sol de la Mañana – morning sun – was established by the Rodriguez family and their exporting company Agricafe after a group of local producers approached them asking for support. What began with just ten smallholders has grown to over 100 farms across Caranavi. The programme functions as a structured school for producers, with a curriculum covering nursery management, plant nutrition, selective harvesting, disease prevention, and financial planning. Crucially, it's backed by the Rodriguez family's own farms, which serve as working demonstrations of everything they teach. Producers who complete the programme receive 70% of the price their coffee sells for – so when quality improves, they feel it directly. It's precisely that kind of economics that keeps producers like Pedro growing coffee rather than switching to other crops, and it's why Sol de la Mañana has become one of the most important initiatives in Bolivian specialty coffee.