Quebraditas | Castillo | Colombia

TL/DR: It's top shotta Edinson Argote back again to slay with a crazy process, only this time it's a Castillo so it doesn't even break the bank.

The processing is always the maddest bit with these coffees.

Processing:

1. Harvesting: This is carried out ensuring a minimum of 80% ripe cherry.

2. Floating: This ensures the removal of green, overripe, and dry cherries.

3. Oxidation: This is done in food-grade plastic drums for 24 hours.

4. Pulping: The cherries are pulped dry.

5. Fermentation: For 48 hours at temperatures below 25°C with specific yeast. After fermentation,

the coffee is then washed.

6. Drying: After washing, the coffee goes into drying, which is carried out for 76 hours at average

temperatures of 38°C.

7. Stabilisation: This is done in grainpro-type bags.

Edinson Argote - Quebraditas

Every time we release a coffee I research the producer or station, and put together a little profile or background to accompany it. It’s nice, it makes me feel close to the coffee, and often reminds me why we do what we do and work with who we work with.

Thing is though, we keep working with the same producers and projects, which is awesome. And although this model of consistent trade and support is overwhelmingly positive, it does get annoying from a marketing perspective having to say new things about the same people all the time.

I think we’ll be buying from Edinson for many years to come, so I thought I’d go a step further with the research and give Quebraditas a full-on write-up.


Birthplace and early childhood

Edinson was born in San Adolfo, a rural coffee community in southern Huila. The township is pretty typical of the region, a few streets with a square and a church in the centre, a population of around 2k nestled below beautiful hills. Today, San Adolfo is around ninety minutes from Pitalito, the nearest major town. During the 90s, when Edinson was growing up, poor roads and frequent roadblocks would’ve made that distance feel much greater.

In 2023, San Adolfo was formally recognised by Colombia's Victims Unit as a community eligible for collective reparation. An official investigation concluded that decades of armed conflict, spanning from 1984 into the early 2000s, had caused lasting social, economic and cultural harm to the community.

It would have been a tough place to grow up, whatever Edinson's own family circumstances. He lost his mother at the age of three and was raised by his sister before leaving home to work at just eleven.

Work Before Coffee

Working from a young age wasn’t unusual in rural Colombia during the 90s, but leaving home to support yourself before reaching your teens is pretty hardcore by any standards.

Edinson spent the next seven years doing whatever work he could find before joining the Colombian Army at eighteen, where he served for around eighteen months.

The turn of the century was particularly unstable for Colombia, compulsory military service would’ve been unavoidable for much of the rural male population. The length of Edinson’s service suggests that he fulfilled his conscription requirements but opted not to pursue a further career in the forces.

Aged 20, his coffee journey began.

Sacks, Bowls, Books

Edinson's first job in coffee was at a buying station operated by his cousin. In a buying station, producers bring their parchment or dried cherry, and the operator tries to quickly assess it and negotiate a price. More often than not, that just means weighing the coffee, checking a sample with a grain probe, and paying market rate. But with higher quality lots, when the producer wants above market rate, the buyer might wish to cup.

In this role, Edinson was exposed to coffees from dozens of different producers growing different varieties, and processing them in different ways. It was here that he first learned to cup and began asking why some coffees were worth so much more than others.

What’s interesting about this period, and Edinson’s journey into coffee, is the point of entry. Many Colombian producers inherit their farms, and cultivation/processing traditions with them. Edinson came into the industry green, and learned that some coffees could command a premium, while others couldn't. At a time when the value of Colombian speciality coffee was gaining wider recognition, his entry to the industry at buyer level gave him a broader perspective than many aspiring producers could’ve hoped for.

Edinson describes his early twenties as a time when he was “a coffee student”. The buying station had sparked something in him, and he began actively pursuing knowledge. He enrolled on cupping courses, trained his palate, and started working with farms to expand his understanding of processing and cultivation.

Granja 92

His transition from "coffee student" to one of Colombia's leading processing specialists took place at Granja 92, Wilton Benitez's world-renowned farm. After a number of years working with farms across Huila and Cauca, Edinson joined Wilton at a time when his reputation and influence within specialty coffee were on a meteoric rise.

Wilton's approach to coffee was groundbreaking. Through the late 2010s he was making pioneering leaps with washing temperatures, yeast inoculation, and a wide variety of fermentation techniques borrowed from the wine and food industries. It wasn't so much the experimentation that took the specialty world by storm, it was the repeatability.

Through laboratory analysis and obsessive measurement, nothing was left to chance. Wilton was able to achieve consistent outcomes from the wildest fermentations, and his coffees were becoming world famous.

All this innovation was happening in front of Edinson's eyes. He eventually rose to become Head of Quality and Processing Control at Granja 92, helping oversee the processing behind some of Colombia's most celebrated coffees. The project shaped him, giving him the technical knowledge and philosophy that still defines his work today.

But after six years, Edinson felt it was time to step out from behind someone else's name. Looking back, he said the project had contributed enormously to his knowledge and personal growth, but he wanted people to recognise his work. If he could help build one of the world's most respected coffee projects, why wouldn’t he want to do it for himself.

Return to Huila

Edinson remained at Granja 92 until the end of 2022, but that wasn’t the only story unfolding. His path was soon to cross with Luz Ángela Rojas.

Raised on her family's coffee farm in Oporapa, Ángela had left home at sixteen to train as a nurse, spending the next decade living and working in Neiva and Bogotá before returning to Huila during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Back in Oporapa, Ángela made the decision to stay. She left what she later described as a "stable job" in nursing and returned to work with her family, determined to build a future around the farm she'd grown up on. In her own words, she rediscovered not only coffee, but "parts of myself that I'd left on pause." She began learning the coffee industry from the ground up while working to raise the profile of her family's farm and the wider Oporapa region.

The two had almost opposite coffee stories, Edinson with no coffee background forcing his way in through ambition and curiosity, and Angela who’d left her family farm in Oporapa to pursue a career in health. Angela had farming roots, organisational talent, and had already been working to raise the profile of her family’s coffee, Edinson had the wider industry experience, and processing philosophy honed alongside one of the masters.

Together, in 2023, they launched Quebraditas

Edinson and Ángela began building Quebraditas into far more than a single coffee farm. The project now spans two neighbouring properties in Oporapa. Chorro Alto, Ángela's family farm, remains the heart of the operation, housing the processing facility, quality lab and drying infrastructure. Alongside it sits Quebraditas, a newer plot dedicated to exotic coffee varieties. Together, the farms cover about eighteen hectares sitting 1,600 to 1,850 MASL.

The processing approach reflects everything Edinson absorbed during his years in Cauca. Every stage is measured, monitored and refined. Every process is stupidly technical, with many coffees requiring almost round the clock monitoring during processing. Fermentations are tracked using pH, Brix and temperature, while selected yeast cultures and carefully controlled drying conditions are used to create coffees with distinctive yet reproducible flavour profiles.

Soil management, strategic shade planting and careful agronomy are treated as inseparable from processing, with the understanding that exceptional coffee begins in the field long before it reaches a fermentation tank.

Their ambition extends beyond their own fences, it seems like the Quebraditas project could be another example of the potential community benefits of speciality prestige. Edinson and Ángela are working to raise recognition for Oporapa. They process coffees under individual producer names, distribute seeds of rare varieties such as Sidra and Gesha to neighbouring farmers, and encourage local producers to pursue higher-value specialty markets.

In only a few years, Quebraditas has become both a farm and a platform, combining technical innovation with a broader effort to raise the profile of an overlooked coffee-growing area neighbouring some of the world’s most famous subregions.

The coffees are totally mad.