About This Coffee
Valentín Carranza Montenegro and his family are dedicated to producing high-quality coffee. His farm is situated on some of the highest land in the town of Gracias a Dios, at a lofty 1,750 meters above sea level.
Valentín named his plot Finca El Corazón after the Spanish word for heart. He feels that farms are the engines that drive the work for a better future. The cherry on top is that, when viewed from above, his land is shaped like a heart.
Cultivation
Valentín and his family cultivate Caturra, Bourbon and Geisha varieties and also several other less
Harvest & Post-Harvest
Cherry is selectively handpicked and then pulped in Valentin’s ecopulper. Coffee is fermented for 36 hours and then washed in clean water. Parchment sundries on drying beds for 15 to 20 days.
More about JUMARP El Palto
Every year, we commit to buying several containers from JUMARP. We believe in the mission of the cooperative and want to support them in the fantastic work they are doing to increase coffee quality, spread organic farming practices and strengthen gender equality in their communities.
We are committed to buying JUMARP’s coffees through thick and thin, even when harvests are difficult. As a result, JUMARP members are able to depend on a certain level of income from their coffee year in and year out. This dependable income helps ensure the longevity of their coffee quality and community improvement projects.
All 188 members produce certified Organic and Fairtrade coffee. The cooperative invests the premiums received from these certifications in a number of important community projects, including crop renovations, a fund for education programs and the construction of schools.
We’re proud to support their carbon capture agroforestry project. Working with 3 other cooperatives and Café Selva Norte, JUMARP members use sustainable agroforestry techniques to protect the environment while improving coffee quality and yield.
Their ambitious quality improvement program launched in 2012 and was completed in 2021. Funded by Fairtrade and Organic premiums as well as through government funding and member contributions, the program helped successfully raise general overall cup scores to 83-84 with microlots at 85-86. To achieve this, they built drying houses, manual pulpers and fermentation tanks at all member farms and helped members plant higher-quality varieties.
About Caturra
Caturra, a coffee variety known for its short, compact stature, is a natural mutation of Bourbon. It was first discovered in Minas Gerais, Brazil around 1915. The variety is the result of the mutation in a single gene of the Bourbon variety that made the plant smaller but still high yielding. As it spread, Caturra enabled higher-density coffee cultivation.
As a direct descendant of Bourbon, Caturra is well known for delicate and complex flavors that are often floral and fruity. At the same time, its close relationship with Bourbon means Caturra is very susceptible to coffee leaf rust (CLR) and other common coffee diseases and pests. As a result, Caturra was later bred with CLR-resistant hybrids from Timor-Leste, producing the Catimor and its subsequent varieties.
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.