Jairo Arcila Honey

About the Coffee

Jairo Arcila grows this coffee at his farm, Villarazo, in Colombia. He's part of the Arcila family, one of Colombia's better-known coffee-producing families, and has built a reputation for careful processing work that consistently produces clean, expressive lots. The Castillo variety he grows here is a Colombian hybrid developed for disease resistance, widely planted across the country at elevations where it can develop good complexity.

This coffee is processed using the honey method, which means the outer skin of the cherry is removed, but a layer of the fruit's sticky mucilage is left on the bean as it dries. That mucilage acts like a slow-release sugar during drying, adding body and sweetness that a fully washed coffee typically doesn't have. It takes more attention than a washed process because the sticky beans need to be turned regularly to dry evenly and avoid fermentation going off course. When it works, the result sits somewhere between the clean brightness of a washed coffee and the fuller fruit character of a natural.

Monogram sources this coffee through a long-term relationship with the Arcila family. That kind of ongoing relationship matters in practice: it gives the roaster visibility into how the coffee was grown and processed each season, and it gives the producer a reliable buyer who cares about quality at the farm level, not just what arrives at the dock.

About Monogram

Ben Put, Justin Eyford, and Jeremy Ho started Monogram in Calgary after working together as baristas and deciding that specialty coffee needed to feel less exclusive. Their first setup was a hand-built coffee cart. Their first Calgary cafe, in the Altadore neighbourhood, opened in 2014. The idea from the start was to make high-quality coffee approachable for anyone who wanted to try it, not just people already deep into the culture.

Ben Put has won the Canadian Barista Championship seven times and placed third at the 2025 World Barista Championship. That competitive background shapes how Monogram approaches sourcing and roasting: they work directly with producers like the Arcila family in Colombia, the Lamastus family at Elida Estate in Panama, and Jamison Savage at Finca Deborah, aiming to bring in coffees they can stand behind on a technical level.