About This Coffee
Rafael Tupayupanqui Vargas has been producing coffees for 50 years on the farm he inherited from his family. As a lifelong coffee producer, his favorite part of cultivating coffee is focusing on specialty production and finding new ways to improve quality. To this end, his goals include entering and winning quality competitions as a way to reach new buyers and acquire the capital to continue improving and updating his farm. Currently, the chief limiting factors on his production are the lack of labor during harvest time and the difficulty of moving coffee to market on his back.
Cultivation
Rafael’s farm is organic by default. He fertilizes his plants with compost and bird manure. His trees are shaded by Pacay tree, which are charmingly also known as the ice cream bean tree. Pacay trees are nitrogen fixing and help replenish nitrogen reserves in the soil.
In addition to coffee, Rafael also cultivates rocoto (a mix between a pepper and a chili).
Harvest & Post-Harvest
Rafael and his family selectively handpick ripe, red cherry and process it on the farm. He visually sorts and then floats cherry to ensure only top-quality cherry is processed. He pulps selected cherry and places parchment in a plastic barrel and ferments it in a sealed, anaerobic environment for 36 hours. Following fermentation, Rafael washes parchment is clean water and lays it to dry on covered raised beds to dry. He rakes parchment frequently to ensure even drying. It takes approximately 5 days for parchment to dry.
Coffee in Peru
Peru holds exceptional promise as a producer of high-quality coffees. The country is the largest exporter of organic Arabica coffee globally. With extremely high altitudes and fertile soils, the country’s smallholder farmers also produce some stunning specialty coffees.
Though coffee arrived in Peru in the 1700s, very little coffee was exported until the late 1800s. Until that point, most coffee produced in Peru was consumed locally. When coffee leaf rust hit Indonesia in the late 1800s, a country central to European coffee imports at the time, Europeans began searching elsewhere for their fix. Peru was a perfect option.
Between the late 1800s and the first World War, European interests invested significant resources into coffee production in Peru. However, with the advent of the two World Wars, England and other European powers became weakened and took a less colonialist perspective. When the British and other European land owners left, their land was purchased by the government and redistributed to locals. The Peruvian government repurchased the 2 million hectares previously granted to England and distributed the lands to thousands of local farmers. Many of these farmers later grew coffee on the lands they received.
Today, Peruvian coffee growers are overwhelmingly small scale. Farmers in Peru usually process their coffee on their own farms. Most coffee is Fully washed. Cherry is usually pulped, fermented and dried in the sun on raised beds or drying sheds. Drying greenhouses and parabolic beds are becoming more common as farmers pivot towards specialty markets.
After drying, coffee will then be sold in parchment to the cooperative. Producers who are not members of a cooperative will usually sell to a middleman.
The remoteness of farms combined with their small size means that producers need either middlemen or cooperatives to help get their coffee to market. Cooperative membership protects farmers greatly from exploitation and can make a huge difference to income from coffee. Nonetheless, currently only around 15-25% of smallholder farmers have joined a coop group.