Victor Quiñonez - A Flying Start in the Mountains of Bolivia

Our Green Buyer, Roland, was blind cupping coffees each day on his trip to Bolivia in 2024 when a particular lot caught his attention on the table – bright, clean, and full of promise. When the information behind the coffee was revealed, he discovered he'd already shaken hands with its producer the day before. That producer was Victor Quiñonez, a first-generation coffee farmer from Taypiplaya whose very first harvest had just landed on the cupping table and made an impression.

Victor's story is one of those beautiful beginnings that gives you hope for the future of Bolivian coffee. He's not following in anyone's footsteps – this is entirely his own path. His neatly laid-out farm sits in the steep mountains of the Taypiplaya Colonia, where he's planted just 1 hectare of Red Catuai. The trees spent their first year in his nursery (during which Victor won a competition for the best nursery among Sol de la Mañana producers – no small feat for someone so new to the game) before being transplanted to the fields, where they've been growing for just 18 months.

Learning the Craft with Sol de la Mañana

Victor is one of 18 Sol de la Mañana members farming in the Taypiplaya colony. The program began nearly a decade ago when a group of independent producers approached the Rodriguez family – the team behind Agricafe and one of the most respected names in Bolivian specialty coffee – and asked for help improving their coffee production. What started as a small initiative has grown into a comprehensive support system for over 100 Bolivian coffee producers.

Sol de la Mañana (Morning Sun) functions like a school for coffee producers, running a structured seven-year curriculum that covers everything from building nurseries to pruning, fertilising, selective harvesting, and even financial management. The idea is simple but powerful: give smallholders the knowledge and skills they need to dramatically improve both the quality and quantity of their coffee, making coffee production sustainable for the long term.

When the program first started, the average producer in the region was harvesting around 2.5 bags of green coffee per hectare – barely enough to scrape by. Through Sol de la Mañana's hands-on training and technical support, producers have seen their yields jump to 20 bags per hectare or more, all while improving cup quality. The program has helped reverse what was looking like a terminal decline in Bolivian coffee production, with many farmers previously abandoning their land for more lucrative crops like coca.

For first-generation farmers like Victor, the program provides something invaluable: a foundation. He's learning alongside experienced producers, receiving monthly visits from Agricafe's agronomists, and building his farm from the ground up using modern, structured practices rather than having to figure it all out through trial and error.

The Taypiplaya Region

Taypiplaya is one of the largest communities in the Caranavi Province – Bolivia's beating heart of coffee production. The terrain here is dramatic: steep hillsides blanketed in lush forest, with natural vegetation covering more than 90% of the territory. Coffee farms are carved into this landscape at elevations between 1,400 and 1,650 metres above sea level, where warm, humid days and cool nights create ideal conditions for slow, even cherry maturation.

The Yungas region (of which Caranavi is part) translates to "warm valley" in the local Aymara language, and it's where roughly 95% of Bolivia's coffee is grown. The climate is rainy and humid – perfect for ripening cherries, but challenging for drying coffee without mechanical assistance. The terrain is also famously difficult to navigate. Coffee here has historically travelled along treacherous mountain roads to reach La Paz, including stretches of the infamous Camino de la Muerte (Death Road) that winds from the high Altiplano down into the Amazon basin.

Despite these challenges, Taypiplaya has emerged as a key producing region for specialty coffee. The Rodriguez family believes it will be central to growing Bolivia's specialty coffee volume in the years to come, and they've been working closely with producers here since 2018 when the colony joined the Sol de la Mañana program.

Processing at Buena Vista Mill

Victor, like many smallholder producers in Taypiplaya, doesn't have the infrastructure to process his own coffee. Instead, he delivers freshly harvested cherries to the Buena Vista mill in Caranavi, owned and operated by the Rodriguez family. This arrangement lets small producers focus on what they do best – growing exceptional coffee – while ensuring their cherries are processed to the highest standards.

Each evening, Buena Vista buzzes with deliveries from Sol de la Mañana farms and Rodriguez's own properties. Every bag of cherries is weighed, sorted by hand, and processed immediately. Agricafe's washed processing is meticulous: cherries are depulped the same day they arrive and fermented in tiled tanks for up to 72 hours. The coffee is then washed, graded by density, and dried slowly on raised beds or in temperature-controlled mechanical dryers – essential in Caranavi's humid climate, where traditional sun-drying is difficult.

The mill's on-site lab tracks every lot through processing, taking samples and measurements daily to guide fermentation with precise data. Each cherry delivery is treated as a unique microlot, processed according to what Agricafe's quality managers decide is the best approach for that particular farm, cultivar, and time of year. It's this obsessive attention to detail that allows coffees like Victor's to shine.

A New Chapter for Bolivian Coffee

Bolivia remains one of the smallest coffee exporters on the continent – producing only around 20,000-30,000 bags annually, the equivalent of what one large Brazilian farm might produce. It's a landlocked country with challenging geography, and coffee production dropped by more than 70% between 2006 and 2020 as producers faced leaf rust, soil depletion, and competition from coca.

But there's a new generation emerging – first-time farmers like Victor who are building their farms from scratch with modern practices, and third-generation producers rediscovering their family's coffee heritage. Thanks to initiatives like Sol de la Mañana, improved traceability, and deeper relationships between exporters and specialty buyers, we're now able to showcase single-producer lots from farmers whose work might otherwise have gone unnamed.