Every Day Is Women's Day

As you drink your coffee this morning, consider this:

The coffee in your hand was almost certainly picked, sorted, washed, and dried by a woman. Women provide up to 70% of the labour in global coffee production. The flavour in your cup? You can thank a woman for that.

And because of customers like you, we get to source exclusively from the women who grow it. This, obviously, excites us immensely!

Today we want to celebrate that truth, and introduce you to one young woman in Colombia who is doing something genuinely exciting in her corner of the world.

Coffee Has Always Been Women's Work

And honestly? We think that is worth cheering about.

From the mountainside farms of Colombia to the washing stations of Ethiopia, women are the ones tending the trees, selecting the ripest cherries, managing fermentation, and laying coffee out to dry. That knowledge is generational and deeply skilled, passed down through families, refined over decades, expressed in every cup.

At Mood Artisan Coffee, we source from women farmers and women-led supply chains because the people shaping what ends up in your cup deserve full credit for it. When women earn well for exceptional work, it flows back into their land, their families, and their communities. Everyone wins, including you on a Sunday morning with something really good in your mug.

Why We Source the Way We Do

At Mood Artisan Coffee, we deliberately seek out coffees from women farmers and women-owned or women-managed washing stations. We look for supply chains where women have real authorship over the product and not just a role in the labour.

The reason is because if the quality in your cup is shaped by women's expertise, the premium you pay for that quality should find its way back to them. That is our sourcing commitment every day of the year.

It also means that when you drink our coffee, you know the story behind it is a good one.

Meet Francy Castillo

We want to introduce you to one of our favourite humans in coffee.

Francy Castillo runs Finca El Ubérrimo in Arboleda, Nariño, high in the Colombian Andes. She grew up on this farm with her parents and four sisters, all of them working the land together. That upbringing gave her something that no classroom could: a deep, intuitive understanding of coffee cultivation from the ground up.

What Francy did with that foundation is what makes her remarkable. She studied agronomy at university, completing her degree through an online program while continuing to work on the farm to fund her own education. After graduating in 2019, she took a field assistant role with Colombia's National Federation of Coffee Growers in her hometown, and sharpened her palate further by working in a private export laboratory in Buesaco.

Then she came home and started building.

Francy now manages the Berruecos project, which she created to help small producers in her region access the specialty coffee market (FYI - Mood's decaf option is from Francy's Berruecos project). Many of her neighbours farm plots too small to attract exporters on their own. Francy brings their parchment coffee together at a collection point she runs, pools the lots, and gets everyone access to the premium prices they deserve. She is running a one-woman economic development program while simultaneously managing a farm and raising the quality bar in her community.

The coffee itself reflects all of that care. At El Ubérrimo, only deeply ripe cherries are harvested. The coffee oxidizes for two days in jute bags before pulping, then ferments for 70 hours, followed by a slow 16-day drying period under covered patios. The result is a coffee that is precise, sweet, and unmistakably the product of someone who genuinely loves what they do.

In your cup it tastes like peach, milk chocolate, and walnut, with a gentle acidity and a round, sweet body. It is a coffee you will keep coming back for.

We sourced this coffee from Apex Coffee Imports in Calgary, Canada and they have been working with the Castillo family since 2021.

Check out Francy's washed caturra here.

Interested in decaf? We have the decaf from her Berruecos project here.

Every Day

International Women's Day is one Sunday on the calendar. The women who grow your coffee show up every other day too.

We are grateful for every producer in our supply chain, and so grateful to you for buying from a women-led business. Today feels like a good day to raise a cup to all the women in our lives.

Happy International Women's Day.

Sources:

• https://www.ico.org/documents/cy2017-18/icc-122-11e-gender-equality.pdf
• https://www.womenincoffee.org/