There’s an awful lot of coffee in…Presteigne, thanks to enterprising café proprietor Elda Macias.

For 20 years Elda’s Coffee House has been a popular meeting place on the town’s High Street and now she is bringing a flavour of her Colombian homeland to customers in Presteigne and beyond.

Half a ton of coffee beans is due to be shipped direct from a farmer and his family in Colombia this month. Elda’s coffee will be available under the label Coffee We Love and she will take orders from a specially set up website coffeewelove Earlier this year, Elda was back home to celebrate her mother, Eliodora’s 80th birthday, and took time out to visit a family farm in the country’s Santander region.

“I am so excited about it!” says Elda, whose café has a strong reputation for coffee, cuisine and conversation. Very much a meeting place in Presteigne, this has even been home to a philosophy club.

From November 26 onwards, customers will be able to sample coffee ground from beans hand-picked from a mountainside, before being loaded on to a ship at Cartagena. When the precious cargo is unloaded at Liverpool docks, Elda will be waiting to bring home the coffee.

It was important for Elda to source her coffee direct from the farmer so that he and his family would receive full payment.

“I’ve been looking into this for a long time, to get the right quality and to find a family-run farm,” she explains. “Through a relative I found a little farm where they grow their beans in the shadows of the trees at an altitude of 1,900 metres – the beans are very special.”

Her grandmother grew her own coffee beans on a bush in the garden, and her great-grandmother farmed coffee so it’s unsurprising that Elda wants to continue the family heritage.

She has made her café an important port of call for customers local and even international. Two Canadians, who visit every year, described a chance meeting in a remote café in central Mexico. Pondering aloud whether their coffee would be as good as Elda’s, another couple asked if they were referring to Elda’s Coffee House at Presteigne!

Excited customers at home keep asking her when the new coffee will be arriving. “It is lovely coffee,” says Elda, “and I want to do my own blend in the future.”

Elda is also considering bringing Colombian-grown cacao beans to Presteigne.

“I think chocolate could be next!”