Peru - Las Etiopes Gesha Lot #14

We're kicking off the 25/26 Peru crop year with some absolute belters, and coming strong out of the gates is this excellent high intervention Gesha from Simon Brown & Merlith Cruz.

Simon and Merlith's farm is in the Jaén province, planted in early 2020 with Ethiopian landrace and JARC lines alongside the more "classic" Latin American cultivars, with roughly half the property preserved as primary forest. Working as Falcon's country manager, Simon's years of quality improvement work with Peruvian smallholders led him to permanently relocate in 2019. His previous role as Head of Sourcing for Falcon gave him the global connections to obtain seedstock with germlines from Jimma, Sidama and Yirgacheffe, hence the name Las Etiopes ("The Ethiopians").

Brew Guide:

Best Brewed with: Filter

Lightest Roaster Influence: With the majority of the Gesha production from Las Etiopes being from the Panamanian accession, we're applying a similar profile as we've had for the El Encanto Gesha, but dropping earlier to account for the more involved processing. We're pushing lighter as we explore this coffee's nuances

Best Rested: 3-4 weeks

Filter: 62g/L & 94°C, with rest we like to move down to 91°C

Espresso: Turbo shots + 3 weeks rest. 18g/50g+ & 20s

We’re tasting: Aromatics of very ripe apricot & mango, and lime zest; in the cup whilst hot it's supremely apricot forward - we find apricot juice, dried apricot, apricot jam, with just a hint of apricot schnapps, all 4 expressions at once; with background notes of raw honey, bergamot, mango, orange blossom and ripe dragon fruit. As it cools down the cup profile evolves - becoming a touch more process forward - we find blueberry yoghurt, strawberry, white florals, a hint of cascara, donut peach. Outstanding

Traceability

Country of Origin:	Peru
Region:	El Porvenir, Jaén, Cajamarca
Producer:	Simon Brown & Merlith Cruz
Farm:	Las Etiopes
Variety:	Gesha
Elevation:	1950 - 2050 MASL
Process:	Bioreactor + Mosto Anoxic Natural: Ripe cherries rinsed and floated in cold spring water to clean and reduce microbial load. Cherries fermented for 24 hours in stainless steel tanks with a proprietary mosto under natural pressure in an anoxic environment. Mosto derived from pulped landrace variety mucilage, cultured with sugar syrup and hops as a natural anti-microbial adjuvant to selectively promote yeast proliferation over bacterial growth. Post-fermentation cherries transferred to covered drying tents for 30 to 35 days of slow solar drying.
Import Partner:	Chacra
Harvest	Crop 25/26, Arrived UK: January 2026; First harvest purchasing Las Etiopes

 

The Story:

We first connected with Simon through mutual friends while looking to expand our Peruvian sourcing network, and samples from his export company Chacra landed late in the 24/25 season. Every single one was outstanding, and we knew immediately that Chacra would be a key part of our Peruvian offer going forward.

Las Etiopes covers eight hectares in total, of which roughly half is preserved as primary forest. The planted area sits on terraced slopes built using pre-Hispanic agricultural practices to manage the steep terrain and prevent soil erosion. The topsoil is dark and rich in organic matter with a clay-heavy subsoil beneath, and the farm has its own water source via a stream that runs its full length and provides water to two surrounding villages. It is one of very few active coffee farms in the village of El Porvenir, and the surrounding primary forest means the planted area exists within a functioning ecosystem rather than a cleared agricultural landscape.

Of the cultivated area, around one hectare is dedicated to Ethiopian landrace and JARC accessions, and a further hectare to more established Latin American cultivars. In 2021, Simon and Merlith expanded by acquiring an additional three hectares of land between 1750 and 1900 masl, planted with Bourbon, Catuai, Caturra, Catimor and a small amount of Pacamara. The Ethiopian germlines were brought from the Jimma region, with more recent plantings from Sidama and Yirgacheffe seedstock. JARC, the Jimma Agricultural Research Centre, was established in 1967 and has released over 40 selected varieties bred for disease resistance and yield without sacrificing cup quality. These selections are distinct from regional landrace populations, which are genetically diverse, locally adapted cultivars that have developed over centuries in specific Ethiopian microclimates. 
Obtaining this material and establishing it outside Ethiopia requires a sourcing network that very few producers have access to (especially as it's quite difficult to legally get viable germplasm out of Ethiopia), and planting it at 1950 to 2050 masl in northern Peru is a direct test of how these cultivars perform outside their evolutionary context.

Peru's speciality coffee sector is overwhelmingly smallholder-driven, with around 150000 farming families producing the country's output across average plot sizes of two to three hectares. The vast majority of this coffee is washed at farm level and sold as parchment, often to intermediaries who transport it through multiple hands before it reaches an exporter. Cajamarca, and Jaén in particular, has established itself as the primary coffee-producing region for export, but the infrastructure gap between farm and port remains significant.

Simon's export company Chacra takes its name from the Quechua word "chakra", meaning a small plot of arable land used to produce food for nearby residents. Beyond Las Etiopes, Simon and Merlith have built both a wet mill and, as of this year, a dry mill, processing cherry purchased from neighbouring outgrower farms and offering producers in the area a direct route to export that bypasses the intermediary chain. The dry mill build slightly delayed their export operations this season but allowed the consolidation of some extremely high altitude late harvest lots that would otherwise have been missed. The vertical integration of farm, wet mill, dry mill, export and import means Simon is deploying his skillset across the entire value chain, from agronomy and picking through fermentation, drying, milling and logistics. It shows in the quality of the coffees we're bringing in, and it means farmers in the area receive a price based on quality rather than whatever the local market rate is on the day they need cash.

Las Etiopes placed 19th in Peru's 2022 Cup of Excellence, its first season producing enough volume to enter. The CoE entry that year washed - indeed, until 2025, almost all production at Las Etiopes was processed as washed. The cool climate at altitude and limited drying space made naturals difficult to produce at any meaningful scale.
This season, Simon and Merlith installed a new polytunnel drying tent to increase capacity and built a dedicated processing lab to house stainless steel tanks modified from beer brewing equipment, food grade plastic bioreactor barrels, and lab equipment including a microscope for isolating and monitoring yeast and bacteria growth prior to inoculation. The mosto used to inoculate production batches is cultured on-site from the mucilage of the landrace varieties grown at the farm, and maintained in a similar fashion to a sourdough starter with regular sugar syrup feedings and close pH monitoring. 

The lot we're featuring here is a classic example of what we talk about when we say "high technical intervention processing" - a direct output of the upgrades to the farm, the post-harvest steps involved a bioreactor fermentation under controlled anoxic conditions using a cultured mosto inoculant. Whilst hops have been used as an adjuvant to control the microbial development in the mosto; we're not counting this as any form of "co-ferment" - as the cherries were not directly fermented with hops themselves.

Peru is a country we've been watching closely for years now, and we've been saying for a while that it has the potential to be the next Panama. Not in the sense of over-capitalised rockstar lots, but in terms of the sheer ceiling for quality, particularly with Gesha at altitude. The combination of cool temperatures, elevation, fertile soils and an increasingly diverse pool of genetic material being planted by technically capable producers means that what's coming out of Peru in the next five to ten years is going to shift a lot of people's assumptions about South American coffee. Producers like Simon and Merlith who are approaching this with both rigour and patience are exactly the people who will define what that looks like - this may be  our first purchase from Las Etiopes, but it will not be our last.