Light roast
$22The wildest coffee we make. Dried whole in the cherry under the Ethiopian sun.
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02 / The family
Sixty five years
Sixty five years
and five countries.
It started on one slope in Colombia. Since then every generation has carried the family's seeds somewhere new. Choose a year to follow them.
1961 · Colombia
The slope nobody wanted
Aurelio Mireles bought four hectares of steep, cloud covered hillside in Huila that his neighbors called too cold for coffee.
He paid for it with eight years of savings and a loan from his wife’s brother, and named it La Cumbre, the summit, because from the top row you could see the whole valley he had worked in. That first year he planted four hundred Typica trees by hand, carrying the seedlings up in sacks because no mule would take the path. The neighbors were right about the cold. The cherries ripened weeks after everyone else’s, and that turned out to be the point.
Aurelio Mireles, first generation
1987 · Guatemala
A second mountain
Aurelio’s son Tomás crossed into Central America with a sack of seed and his father’s notebook, copied out by hand over three nights.
La Cumbre could feed one family well but not two, and Tomás had never been good at sharing a slope with his father. He found what he wanted in Huehuetenango, below the Cuchumatanes, where warm winds off Mexico keep the frost away and coffee grows higher than it has any right to. He named the farm El Mirador, the lookout. Father and son wrote to each other every month for the rest of Aurelio’s life, mostly about rain.
Tomás Mireles, second generation
2003 · Ethiopia
Where coffee began
Tomás’s daughter Elena went to Sidama for one harvest season to find out what coffee tasted like before anyone farmed it.
She worked alongside smallholder families who had grown coffee in their gardens for generations, among heirloom varieties nobody had bothered to name. They taught her to dry the whole cherry in the sun and turn it by hand every hour. She wrote to her father that she was staying another season, and never left. Aurelio tasted her coffee once, in 2006, and wrote one line in the notebook: this one I do not understand, and I like it very much.
Elena Mireles, third generation
2011 · Kenya
Red soil, bright cups
Rosa’s son Mateo stopped in Kenya for a week on his way home from Ethiopia and stayed for a month.
Around Nyeri the soil is deep red from old volcanic ash, and the coffee grown in it tastes like nothing in the Americas. He went home, told his mother he was leaving, and spent two years saving. He grows SL28 and SL34, selected in Kenya in the 1930s for exactly this soil, and washes them in long stone channels. Rosa says his coffee tastes like her son talks.
Mateo Mireles, third generation
2018 · Panama
The Geisha ridge
Near the back of Aurelio’s notebook, in shaky handwriting, was a single word underlined twice: Geisha.
He had read about the rarest variety in coffee and never tasted it. After he died in 2016 the family read the notebook aloud around the kitchen table, and Lucía decided somebody should grow it for him. She planted Geisha on a ridge above Boquete where a fine mist the locals call bajareque drifts over the trees most afternoons, and named the farm La Neblina. The trees took four years to crop. The first bag of every release goes back to La Cumbre and sits on the shelf beside the notebook.
Lucía Mireles, third generation
2024 · Austin
Five farms, one roastery
Sofía was the first Mireles in three generations who did not want to farm. She wanted to know what happened to the coffee after it left.
Ten years of pulling espresso and learning to roast in Austin taught her what she did not like: by the time the family’s coffee reached a cup it had passed through exporters, importers and brokers, and the people drinking it never knew who had grown it. So the cousins took it the whole way themselves. Austin put her two days by road from the Mexican border and a short flight from Bogotá, which mattered more than it sounds. Green coffee now arrives from each farm after its harvest, and Sofía roasts it herself on a single 12 kg roaster. On the shelf beside it sits the copy of the notebook Tomás wrote out by hand in 1987.
Sofía Mireles, head roaster
