Born from the field. Built for the cup.
Montubio Drip didn't start with a business plan. It started with two people who understood that Ecuador's coffee was being ignored by the world — and that someone with the right origin, the right knowledge, and the right story could change that.
Born in the field. Roasting since before he knew what specialty coffee was.
Barón grew up in Jama, Manabí — deep in montubio country, where the land isn't a concept, it's a way of life. He learned to roast coffee as a child, in a clay pot over a wood fire, helping his mother. Not as a craft exercise. As part of the house.
His family were coffee traders. His brother Luchomabo was his first real connection to the people who grow it — producers who had dedicated their lives to the land for generations.
He lived in the United States in the 1990s, then came back. Not to the city — to the field. That return is when he understood what he had always known: the coffee from his Ecuador was extraordinary, and almost no one outside was paying attention.
At the San Diego World Coffee expo, he counted two small Ecuadorian booths in a sea of origins from around the world. That wasn't discouraging. It was an opening.
His favorite moment in the entire process isn't the cupping, or the roast, or the sale. It's paying the producers — watching hands dirty from real work receive the money they actually deserve.
"Life is too short to drink bad coffee."
Environmental scientist. Evolutionary biologist. The person who bet on Ecuadorian coffee during a pandemic.
Katherine isn't just a biologist — she's an environmental scientist and evolutionary biologist who sees fermentation the way most people can't: as a process governed by science, shaped by variables, and endlessly worth experimenting with.
When the pandemic hit, she watched cafés close and assumed the worst. Instead, she saw something else: international demand for Ecuadorian coffee and cacao was growing. People had stopped going out but kept ordering in. Producers were struggling, and that meant farms were available to invest in.
She didn't see a crisis. She saw a window.
That instinct — to move when others stop, to trust the data over the noise — is what she brought to Montubio Drip. The science of origin. The discipline of process. The understanding that what happens between the cherry and the cup is biology, chemistry, and time — and that getting it right is not an accident.
They built it together from the first day they decided to.
Barón had the land, the roots, and the relationships. Katherine had the science, the market instinct, and the conviction. When they came together as partners — in life and in work — the combination was immediate.
What they share is stronger than what divides them: a belief that the producers who grow this coffee deserve to be paid well, known by name, and represented with honesty in every market they reach.
Ecuador's coffee was nearly invisible at the world's largest specialty coffee expo. Two small booths. That's where Montubio Drip begins — and where it intends to change the story.
World Coffee — the gap they saw
with full producer traceability
into the next harvest