About This Coffee
After working for about 15 years for Cenfrocafe (one of Peru’s largest and most respected cooperatives), Maximiliano García and Esperanza Armijos started their own farm in around 2018, transforming themselves into dedicated coffee producers who manage their farm together with a focus on quality and sustainability. Their collaborative efforts emphasize the importance of family in coffee production, blending innovation with traditional farming practices. They are resolutely BOTH equal contributors to their production and are adamant that both have equal billing in any mentions of Café Garmas.
Esperanza and Maximiliano have called their coffee Café Garmas (a combination of their family names, Garcia and Armijos) to highlight the collaborative and equal contributions both make in managing the land and producing high quality lots.
Cultivation
Esperanza and Maximiliano cultivate a range of varities at Café Garmas, including Geisha, Bourbon, Parainema, L9 and Yellow Caturra (such as this lot).
This family consistently achieves 86+ scoring lots thanks to their hard work perfectly combined with the unique conditions of their location. The farm is extremely remote (a 6 to 8-hour drive from the nearest airport or an approximately 40-hour journey from Peru’s capital, Lima) and is located in a stunning region with views stretching into Ecuador. While hard to get to, the area produces extraordinary coffee: the hotter, more arid climate contributes to rare and exceptional lots with remarkable flavor profiles, making coffee from this region both distinctive.
Harvest & Post-Harvest
After meticulous selective hand picking, coffee is delivered to the farm to be pulped and fermented. Fermentation happens in lime-washed tanks and is controlled to highlight the coffee's best characteristics, while drying is done in thin layers on tarps. The beans are regularly raked to maintain even moisture levels and drying.
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.