For Mighty Oak Roasters, great coffee begins long before the beans reach Astoria. Co-founder Sean Donnelly travels around the world visiting coffee farms and producing communities, building relationships with the people responsible for the coffees Mighty Oak serves. That personal connection to farmers, along with a shared commitment to quality, sustainability and responsible sourcing, is at the heart of the Astoria roaster’s approach.

One coffee that particularly embodies that philosophy is Escuela y Café, a single origin coffee from La Escuela Buena Vista in Totoró, Colombia, in the country’s Cauca region. The coffee is the result of a long running educational program that Mighty Oak says it is honored to bring to the United States for the first time.

Escuela y Café, Spanish for “School and Coffee,” is an initiative started by Colombia’s National Federation of Coffee Growers (FNC) that works with schools in rural communities throughout the Cauca department. 

For years, the program has introduced students across grade levels to coffee growing, processing and roasting, giving young people practical knowledge of an industry deeply connected to their communities.

The mission extends well beyond making better coffee. In parts of Cauca, coca cultivation and the violence associated with the illicit drug trade have created significant challenges for rural communities. Escuela y Café aims to provide young people with knowledge and economic opportunities within the legal coffee industry, creating another potential path toward a sustainable livelihood.

As students move through the program, their education extends beyond the classroom and into their own homes and communities. Younger students and their families can receive coffee seedlings to cultivate together, putting lessons about coffee growing and sustainability into practice with the support of parents and other family members. By the time those students reach high school, the trees can be producing meaningful harvests, giving them firsthand experience with the agricultural and economic side of coffee production. Income from those harvests can help support higher education or provide a foundation for young producers who may eventually choose to operate farms of their own.

It is exactly the kind of story that resonates with Sean’s approach to sourcing. His travels take him directly to coffee producing regions around the world, where he can meet farmers, walk farms and better understand the environmental, social and economic circumstances behind each crop. For Sean and Mighty Oak, sustainability is not simply about how coffee is grown. It is also about building meaningful relationships and helping ensure coffee producing communities can thrive for generations to come.

“Traveling to origin gives me the opportunity to meet the people behind the coffee and understand firsthand the work that goes into every harvest,” Sean said. “We put a lot of care into our roasting process, but roasting can only develop and refine the flavors that are already there. It’s the producers who set the potential for what a coffee can ultimately become. Escuela y Café is especially meaningful because you can see that idea extending to the next generation, giving young people the knowledge and opportunity to build a future through coffee.

Escuela y Café has an outsized impact in the communities where coffee is produced, connecting education with agriculture, entrepreneurship and the possibility of long term economic independence.

The coffee itself brings that story to life in the cup. Grown at La Escuela Buena Vista in Totoró, it features tasting notes of lemon bar, maple and panela, combining bright citrus character with rich sweetness and the distinctive caramel like qualities associated with Colombia’s traditional unrefined cane sugar. Once sourced, the beans make their way to Queens, where Mighty Oak uses its signature wood fired roasting process to develop the coffee’s unique character.

Escuela y Café is currently available through Mighty Oak’s online shop, where customers can order freshly roasted bags for delivery, or purchase it directly from Mighty Oak’s Astoria café and roastery at 28-01 24th Avenue. This particular harvest came from a small lot and will only be available for a limited time. Mighty Oak, however, sees this as just the beginning. The roastery is committed to growing its relationship with Escuela y Café, sourcing more coffees through the program in upcoming harvests and continuing to support the project in the years ahead.

From classrooms and coffee farms in Cauca to a wood fired roaster in Astoria, Escuela y Café represents the kind of connection Mighty Oak wants customers to experience. For Sean and the Mighty Oak team, knowing where a coffee comes from means understanding the farmers, families and communities behind it and recognizing programs working to make coffee production more sustainable for the next generation.

For customers, that makes Escuela y Café more than another single origin release. It is a cup rooted in education, opportunity and a more sustainable future for coffee producers.