The origin of WellBorn’s first single-origin

German checking beans under banana trees that cover the entire farm at Finca Brasil in Arbeláez, Colombia.

Wellborn Coffee began with a simple idea…

a longtime friend and business partner of ours, Aziz Colmenares has a farm that his family owns and manages in Arbeláez, Colombia. We usually work on all kinds of advertising project together, but one day he came to us with some news that the work they had been doing for the past 10 years on the farm had started to pay off and that the 10 hectares of coffee they had very meticulously raised had started to yield some really good harvests. So we sat down and did some thinking and figured out that the best possible way, the most fair and direct way to let the coffee find an audience would be to bring it to America ourselves.

Now I know what you are thinking, you’re thinking I’m crazy. And you’re right, it’s a totally nuts idea.

From the beginning the goal was to support the farm, not to be coffee roasters, not to open up a cafe or coffee shop somewhere. We wanted to ensure that the farm got the most possible value on a pound of green beans. Thankfully, it was a simple idea.

BTW, coffee is a fruit that starts out as a cherry, it’s picked, then the fruit of the cherry is removed exposing the seed which is dried and that seed which is green until it is roasted is your coffee bean.

Now we can talk all day long about the macroeconomics of coffee production around the world, but suffice to say, a farmer in Colombia averages about $0.89 a lb. for their beans.

Read about Our Coffee to get a better insight into the economics of coffee production.

Vanessa sorting through drying beans. The farm fully washes the beans before they dry on beds for 3-6 weeks.

The very first shipment of bags on arrival at JFK.

Paying it forward.

The average price for a 12 oz. bag of specialty coffee is somewhere around $18-20 and that plain doesn’t make sense! It means that either the costs to get the product from farm to market are exorbitant or most of the value is going into the brand’s pockets. From years of being in, around, and next to the coffee world, we knew that the farmers were getting the rough end of the stick here.

So we set about trying to figure out how we could get the avg. cost up for our farm in Arbeláez to at least $2.89 if not more. Keep in mind this farm is totally organic and operates biodynamically - there are no chemicals on the property, anywhere. It’s completely a completely natural shade covered farm that has cilantro, banana trees and a variety of other flora that all work together to make a truly exceptional coffee bean. As you can imagine, it ain’t cheap… and the risks to farm this way are really high.

Jump ahead, a few years, we’ve had three harvests and the plants have matured, we are planting 3,000 more plants on the farm and modernizing the farm to be it’s most efficient.

Oh! And since we fly these beans from Bogata on a Delta flight, we had to figure out a way to roast them stateside. So we became roasters after the fact - talk about a (not) great business plan. But since we know our goals are to 1.) stay true to our farms and pay fair rates, and 2.) offer the freshest, most interesting coffee anywhere, we partnered with a great roaster — John Minotti who believes in the mission to support the farms, and has been in the business for as long as I have been drinking coffee, he jumped willingly on the crazy train with us.