About This Coffee
This coffee is grown by Rubiani Fernández Requejo, the daughter of coffee farmers, who started cultivating her coffee plot at 18. She grows varieties such as Caturra, Catimor, and Typica and has earned recognition for the quality of her coffee. She is also well-regarded for her excellent management of coffee plots and the drying process.
Cultivation
The province of Chote is fairly new to coffee; it used to be known for other crops, like potato and wheat, but coffee has been grown in the region for a few years now, and it's gaining recognition for its quality.
Santos owns 3 hectares of land in total, 2 of which are dedicated to coffee, located in the Miraflores settlement at an elevation of 1,900 meters above sea level.
From a young age, Luciano worked hard to acquire his own land. He now has 4.5 hectares of land, 3.5 of which are dedicated to coffee, located in the Las Limas settlement at an elevation of 1,800 meters.
Harvest & Post-Harvest
Rubiani grows varieties such as Caturra, Catimor, and Typica.
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.