Altitude first
Every farm sits between 1,650 and 2,050 metres, where cold nights slow the cherries down and build sweetness.
Our story
Sixty five years
Sixty five years
and five countries.
One family has farmed coffee since 1961, starting on a single slope in Colombia and spreading to five countries across three generations. Every farm is run by a family member, and since 2024 every bag has been roasted by the family in Austin, Texas.
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
What the family believes
No brokers.
No brokers.
no blends, no shortcuts.
Behind those three lines is the sentence on the first page of Aurelio's notebook: a coffee tree remembers everything you do to it, and so do the people who drink it.
Only ripe cherries
Everything is picked by hand, and pickers walk the same trees up to six times a season rather than stripping a branch.
Processed where it grows
Every farm pulps, ferments, washes or dries its own coffee on site, so nothing is lost between tree and bed.
Neighbors are family too
Wherever a Mireles farms with local growers, they pay above the market price and buy the same cherries year after year.
Roasted to show the farm
Sofía roasts to the farm, so a Guatemalan tastes like Huehuetenango and a Colombian tastes like Huila.
A name on every bag
Every coffee says who grew it, because someone did.
Growing, not yet selling
Kenya and Panama
Two of the five farms are not on general sale yet. They are in the story because they are part of the family, and we would rather tell you that than pretend otherwise.
Kenya
Since 2011Next harvest, two crops a year means it will not be long.
Panama
Since 2018Released once a year, in 400 bags. Readers of the letter hear first.
One family.
Every cup.
“A coffee tree remembers everything you do to it. So do the people who drink it.”Aurelio Mireles, founder Shop the roasts