Palm Trees & Toucans Estate Coffee Beans

In today’s world, many well-known coffee estates boast long histories, having developed over generations and accumulated extensive experience in coffee cultivation and processing. However, Colombia’s Palm Trees & Toucans Estate stands out as quite the outlier, as it has a very young history and its owners have rather unique identities.

Established in 2011, the Palm Trees & Toucans Estate was co-founded by a mad scientist, a passionate founder, a dedicated farmer, and a gifted artist. Despite its young history, the estate has achieved remarkable results — the winning beans used by the 2019 World Barista Championship (WBC) champion came from this estate.

One of the estate’s founders, Felipe, has been involved in the specialty coffee industry for over a decade. He previously ran green bean trading operations in the United States but decided to return to Colombia around 2010 to contribute to his homeland’s specialty coffee industry revolution.　

The estate manager, Sebastián, who is the 2018 Colombian Coffee Brewing Championship winner, is passionate about promoting Colombian coffee globally.

Unlike traditional coffee producers, they did not inherit any coffee farms from previous generations. Instead, they set out to find what they believed to be the most ideal coffee-growing environment (Ecotopo): the perfect altitude, ideal weather, just the right amount of sunlight and natural shade, good water sources, suitable temperatures, and local coffee growers specialized in the area.

In their first year, they visited over a hundred farms, but it wasn’t until November 2011 that they found a satisfying location and purchased an 18-hectare plot. This land is located in the Cundinamarca region of the Eastern Andes Mountains, at an altitude of 1,600–2,200 meters. The mountain features nearly pristine forests divided by the beautiful Apulo River. Monsoons from the Pacific Ocean and moist, warm air currents from the Amazon converge here, creating a complex and varied microclimate that imparts rich terroir flavors to the coffee. The high altitude also gives the coffee here a uniquely distinctive character.

The farm is equipped with advanced LPET processing facilities where they process coffee cherries purchased from neighboring farms and crop series. In addition to actively assisting surrounding smallholder farmers in improving their planting and processing techniques through the Neighbors & Crops project, the estate owner has dedicated the past five years to cultivating unique terroir flavors on their own farm, investing significant resources and time in cultivation and processing. Moreover, they have developed different product lines to cater to various flavor preferences, the highest-quality representation of the estate being the Estate & Varietals project.