Santos Perez Ramirez
Santos Perez Ramirez has been a member of Coopeflor for many years, and has held a handful of leadership positions over the years. Though many members use the association’s wet mill, Santos has a wet mill on his farm, and chooses to process there. He harvests ripe cherries, and typically combines two days of picking before de-pulping, which helps to manage small daily harvests and streamlines the processing during the height of the harvest season.
After de-pulping, he leaves the coffee to undergo a 24 hour dry fermentation in a covered tank, where it is regularly stirred to ensure an even fermentation while maintaining a stable temperature. From there, the coffee is washed, floated to remove low-density beans, and dried on the communal patio. Following lessons from the previous harvest, Santos adjusted his drying practices by spreading the coffee in thicker layers to slow the drying process and homogenize the moisture content- drying these days takes about seven days. When space at the communal patio is limited, partially dried coffee is moved to the terrace at his home to finish drying.
His small parcels of caturra, pache, bourbon and catuaí sit between 1600 and 1800 masl. Santos recently received investment from a government project to plant hardwood trees for long-term financial stability and as a way to diversify the shade trees on the farm - he has planted palo blanco (a hardwood tree), which he hopes his children can at some point cut down for more income. Santos does not use herbicides on the farm, and instead keeps weeds and green plants throughout the farm to maintain moisture in the soil and return valuable nutrients to the soil.
He’s a judicious pruner, carefully pruning trees after the harvest to keep them healthy (too many branches and leaves can invite fungus including roya). Additionally, he decomposes his coffee pulp with animal manure and sugarcane juice to return nutrients to the soil. Santos’ son Augusto is equally interested in coffee, participating in a local cupping activity and taking an active interest in the family farm’s cupping notes.
