Please check out our other offerings from Peru below.
Green Coffee Offerings : South America: Peru |
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View Our Current Peruvian Coffees
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Upcoming Crop CommentsI took a trip in mid-September 2009 to check up on the work with the co-op that I visited in 2006. That might seem like a long time to wait - but it is just 2 full crop cycles. The results were not that great; it seems that the opportunity to sell medicore coffee for a quick cash sale tends to undermine a sustained effort to really improve the crop. See my travelogue about the trip. Our contact there - K C O'Keefe, has moved back to Peru, so perhaps something will work out for the fall. |
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Organic Peru ... you can get it anywhere now. It is usually the cheapest certified Organic coffee on the market, it's the "blender" coffee of Organics, it's $4/Lb. roasted at Trader Joes. And it is threatening to lower prices for organic coffee farmers globally. The Peruvian coffee industry took note of the premium prices paid for Organic coffee, and realized they could produce Organic for less cost, focusing on quantity, not quality. They wanted to be to Organic coffee what Vietnam is to robusta. There are stories of forest being clear-cut for organic farm (it takes 3 years for an existing farm to become certified organic... not so with a "new" farm. I doubt the image of cutting forest to grow organic product is an image consumers have in mind ... then again, it's Organic and it's $4 per lb. roasted. Well, you get what you pay for. The problem is, the Peruvian organic coffee glut forces quality-oriented farmers within Peru and everywhere else too to accept lower prices for their crop in order to compete. And a farm that is trying to produce a truly excellent coffee in a conscientious way cannot compete with a larger quantity-oriented farm, whether its a co-op or not. Cup a Trader Joe's organic Peru versus a high quality Organic Peru and the differences are profound: not only do the cheap ones have little to no positive qualities, they also have defective taints in the cup, grassy, fermenty notes in particular. Okay, I am a little cynical about Peruvian coffee. It's not because there aren't good lots though. They do exist and it takes some detective work to find them. After all, Peru is a hugely varied land and they produce a lot of different coffees. It's the land of the Incas and by most measures a latecomer in the modern world coffee trade. Peruvian offerings are hardly mentioned in William Ukers 1936 edition of All About Coffee and have not been well thought of due to an indelicate, blunted acidity that doesn't have the refinement of the Centrals. I think a lot of this is historical bias because Peru can produce some very fine coffees. In general, these coffees have Central American brightness but in a South American coffee flavor package overall. The good organic lots do have more of a "rustic" coffee character. As long as it is kept in check and does not dominate the cup, this can add interest to the flavor rather than detract. The cup has it all, body, brightness and good depth in the flavors. While there are still mediocre arrivals, it doesn't take much cupping to find a really good one. The Chanchamayo is usually (but not necessarily) the top region, but good Norte and Cuzco from the south are out there. Buy the first Peru you are offered and you are bound for cup troubles. Poorly processed coffee, coffee with defects, might fool the cupper at first, but 2 months down the line the coffee fades, the acidity fails, baggy flavors emerge, and you know you made a bad decision. It's a lot of work to find a good lot among the abundance offered by brokers and other channels, and it takes slogging through a lot of samples to find them though. But hey, it's better slogging through samples at a cupping table than stacks of paper at a desk! I have been to Peru a few times - here is the travelog from my first visit in 2006, and then when I acted as head judge of regional competition in 2008. 9/23/09: I went to visit the Capacy Co-Op in Peru in Sept. 09. |
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 Peru has too much altitude! It is one of the few places I have visited where you fly in and then drive down to the coffee. But that is the case when you fly into to Cusco in the interior of the country. |
 Tomas Ovalle and I look at his coffee cherry on his farm in Canelon Peru. |
Our Peruvian Coffee Offerings:
Please refer to our Reference Page for definitions of terms and cupping numbers used below Check out the Sweet Maria's Coffee Home Roasting Forum for more conversation about home roasting this and other coffees.We are currently out of stock. The review below is provided for your reference.
I visited Las Delicias a few years back, and then again in late 2009. It was like walking into an enchanted forest. Corny but true. We wound our way up and up a long twisty road until we were at about 1600 meters, and a chill as in the air. When we finally leveled out a bit we came into something I can't describe as a town ... more like a tiny community where the home of the patriarch coffee producer Zenon Huaman Vargas. They are all Huaman here. It made such an impression on me, this little family-community, a place with no commerce, no store, and with such a strong multi-family group working together to improve their coffee, improve the quality of their lots to bring a better price, improve their lives. I imagine how groups of families bonded together homesteading the western US with the same spirit. Anyway, this has nothing to do with the coffee, and in another sense it has absolutely everything to do with the coffee. Brother Lucio's lot was the one that really impressed us this year, and was the highest-scoring coffee in the cuppings I did in Lima before we headed up to Cusco farm areas. The dry fragrance is has a clean fruited note, caramel, as well as a gardenia flower hint. The wet aroma has delicate sweetness, lightly caramelized sugar, and peach. It is a brighter cup, more dynamic, than our Peru small-farm coffees from Canelon, with a lighter body and effervescent quality. The lighter roasts are better with this coffee, having marmalade jammy flavors, ripe orange, and jasmine hints. The body is fairly light, and it finishes with apple-like sweetness. Full City roasts score well too, but the coffee tails off as you approach 2nd crack, so best to avoid it. As it cools the City roast has peach tea notes, fruit up front and then a tea-like dryness in the finish. This is best as a brewed coffee; I tried some SO espresso shots with it but found it a bit too bright and imbalanced for extraction.
This coffee is part of our direct trade Farm Gate pricing transparency program.
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by Thompson Owen and Sweet Maria's Coffee, Inc. and is not to be
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