Our sourcing has focussed on three primary distinctions for coffee lot styles: microlots, cooperatives, and community lots. We have encountered 87+ cups and complex characteristics among all three.

Ceviche, Pisco Sours, ayahuasca, and stunning coffees — yes, we are talking about Peru! We’ve done our best to get coffees shipped on time this season (though we can’t make any promises about our containers of ayahuasca). The producers started harvesting in July/August and many continued through the end of October. Even with the unprecedented delays due to shipping container shortages, our first container has already arrived safely and is unloaded into the warehouse. Subsequent containers from higher altitude lots will continue to trickle in through the end of the year, with the final containers arriving by the end of January.

Visiting our partners in Peru

Since we started working with Peru a couple years ago, our sourcing has focussed on three primary distinctions for lot styles: microlots, cooperatives, and community lots. These delineations speak more to the lot size and traceability than to the quality or profile, as we have encountered 87+ cups and complex characteristics among all three. To give you an idea of size, the microlots are typically limited to 15-25 bags, while the community lots and cooperatives generally offer 60-100 bags. We’re in our second year of working with Cedros, a small cooperative that continues to impress us with their washed and naturals. Norcafe is another project to keep an eye on, comprised of young producers in the Amazonas region. Both of these relationships were made possible with the hard work of our sourcing partner, Eleva Finca.

To be perfectly honest, we were bracing ourselves for a challenging season. With Peru still reeling from a difficult year and persistently high rates of Covid infections, coupled with the rally of the C-market, our concerns were understandable. The pandemic has created issues with labor shortages and countless other problems that translate to delayed logistics. Since a higher C-price is often associated with reduced incentive for quality production, you can imagine our relief when we finally started cupping through delicious offer samples!

With quality seemingly unaffected, we’re looking at the spiking C-market with a healthy dose of optimism. In the immediate sense, higher prices justify the hard work producers are putting into their coffees. As part of the bigger picture, the sustainable wage also encourages them to continue producing coffee well into the future. This is key, since Pervuian farmers have historically struggled more than others in making a sustainable business out of coffee. Most of the production is also organic, which generally equates to especially low yields per hectare. With all of that in mind, we’re happy to continue paying whatever is necessary to import these beautiful coffees and share them with the European coffee community.

We hope you’re as excited as we are to have the rest of these coffees landed!

Categories: 2021Peru

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