Colombia – El Vergel

Patrick Groenewold, a former chef turned coffee consultant, and Bas Burghoorn, a business school educated sales and marketing professional, started Single Estate as a green coffee import business in 2007 after their first steps on a plantation in Brazil, and began roasting their own coffee in 2009 after realizing that controlling the roast was the only way to guarantee the quality they had seen at origin. The roastery, now located in Dronten, has evolved from its original Giesen 2 kilogram machine to a Loring 15 kilogram and Giesen 50 kilogram setup, and the team focuses exclusively on single origin coffees with no blends, a principled stance rooted in the belief that each coffee should stand entirely on its own. Groenewold travels personally to origins dealing one on one with producers, and around 85 percent of the coffees are considered direct trade built on year after year relationships with the same farms, while 80 to 90 percent of green coffees carry organic certification or equivalent accreditation such as Rainforest Alliance. The six member roasting team includes Wendelien van Bunnik Verver, the 2019 Dutch Barista Champion and World AeroPress Champion who heads training, and Jonatan Scheeper, the 2017 Dutch AeroPress Champion and head roaster who co founded the defunct Headfirst micro roaster. Single Estate opened a flagship in The Hague in September 2019 inside a two story, 300 square metre corner shop with a Jugendstijl facade, and now supplies over 150 business customers from a roastery that has grown from handling six containers a year into one of the most accomplished single origin operations in the Netherlands.