Peru - Cumaccha Espresso

Logistics and pre-planning are the lifeblood of a roastery - we typically contract coffees as far up-stream as possible, planning our schedule 3-9 months in advance. But sometimes that final few weeks can be a bit crunchy - having flown through the Kibingo, our next espresso focused lot has seen a 3 week delay arriving to the UK.

Having flipped through our proverbial rolodex of cupping notes of available coffees we thought were great, we've alighted on this delightful lot from Scenery pals Chacra. Coffees from this region of Peru haven't had the fanfare they deserve, but they've quietly been building a reputation for quality amongst those who know. Extremely high altitude farms and anoxic processing lead to an excellent coffee for espresso when profiled with a heavier hand in the roaster.

Brew Guide:

Best Brewed with: Espresso, Immersion (Aeropress/French Press), Moka pot

Medium-Light Roaster Influence: A longer roast with a bigger batch size when compared to our typical filter roasts of anoxic naturals, the biggest difference to our filter approach for this style of coffee is in the extended development and hotter end temperature - reducing acidity and increasing body, with additional roast related sugar notes.

Best rested for: 2-3 weeks

For Filter: We recommend a ratio of 65g/L and 92°C water

For Espresso: 18g in, 44g out, 30-35s for a classic style of espresso. Can also pull 18g / 50g / 20-25s turbos

We’re tasting: 

In milk -

The Story

Piura is not where most people expect to find coffee. The region is more commonly understood as desert coast: a strip of Pacific lowland at the northern limit of Peru, where the Humboldt Current meets the equatorial heat and rainfall is so unreliable that the land alternates between drought and catastrophic El Niño flooding with little in between. But the department extends east into the Andes, and in its highest sierra - above the towns of Ayabaca and Montero, above the point where the road from the coast finally gives out into single-track mountain path - arabica has been grown for well over a century, with most of that time being grown in obscurity.

The coffee that left Sierra Piura for most of the twentieth century left without an identity. Smallholders in the high districts of Ayabaca and Huancabamba would harvest, dry and sell their crop to itinerant intermediaries who carried it down to the coast and across the Ecuadorian border, where it was blended and re-exported under Colombian or Ecuadorian certificates of origin. The coffee was, in every practical sense, stateless and fungible. Its providence was unmarketable, its quality neither tested nor rewarded, and the people who grew it had no mechanism for claiming otherwise.

Many of the families farming these slopes in the 1980s were doing so on plots carved from expropriated haciendas, granted title by Peru's 1969 agrarian reform but left without the markets, infrastructure or institutional support to translate that title into economic stability. Rural-to-urban migration was accelerating; the violence of the Sendero Luminoso years made the sierra worse still.

In the early 1990s, when a German-Peruvian NGO called PIDECAFE (founded in 1991 alongside agronomists from the Universidad Nacional de Piura) began working with a first cohort of smallholders explicitly to slow migration and organise quality production. From that foundation, in 1995, CEPICAFE emerged as the region's first formal coffee cooperative, holding Fairtrade certification within two years and exporting its first container through the German world-shop network shortly after.

It was the first time Piura coffee had left the country as "itself" - a single origin in the most "classical" sense of the world, ala the early, early days of speciality. The cooperative that grew from that beginning, now known as Norandino, is today one of Peru's most established fair-trade producers, and the cooperative infrastructure it seeded across Ayabaca, Huancabamba and the border districts of Cajamarca set the conditions for everything in Piura's speciality development since.

What has come more slowly is lot-level traceability - the kind of sourcing that moves beyond certified blend volumes into named-community, farm-specific procurement. Chacra's Cumaccha is one of the first lots we have encountered from this region that is starting to make the shift - Simon pitched it to us at the cupping table as highlighting an underappreciated region, and we're stoked the logistical delays of our next espresso have made space to bring it on the offer.

Chacra have named the lot after the Cataratas de Cumaccha, a complex of waterfalls in the Ambasal sector of the Comunidad Campesina Cuyas-Cuchayo, a farming community of roughly eighty years' standing on the high slopes that descend from Ayabaca town toward Montero and Jililí.

The falls sit at the edge of the Bosque de Neblina de Cuyas, a cloud forest recognised by Peru's Ministry of the Environment in 2015 as a private conservation area of just over a hundred hectares. This is a headwater landscape, a cabecera de cuenca that feeds the Quiroz and Chira river systems draining west to the Pacific coast. Coffee farms on these slopes are intercropped with banana, citrus and maize in the tradition PIDECAFE established in its early field schools, and sit at altitudes that reach towards the treeline, where significant temperature variation between day and night allows delayed cherry maturation.

The community cultivates principally Caturra, Bourbon and Catimor. The last of these is an inheritance of the 2013 leaf-rust outbreak that devastated Typica plots across the sierra and prompted many growers to replant with rust-resistant material. While Catimor has a bit of a rough reputation, the cultivation at Altitude certainly isn't doing any harm to its quality potential - while we find some of the Catimor notes present in the cup, they're generally integrated in a positive way.