Peru - Wilber Tello's SL9

Contrasting the first SL9 from Edwin Herrera, here we see the impact of higher altitude - a whopping 2200 MASL - with more paired back processing. This coffee is outrageous - we're stoked we managed to acquire it, and we've a little more available than the first SL9 release

This coffee holds the joint place with Edwin's SL9 as one of the best samples from any origin we tried in 2025 - not to be missed.

Brew Guide:

Best Brewed with: Filter

Lightest Roaster Influence: We're hovering just a fraction more developed than the last SL9 - we noticed it was slower to pick up colour compared to the previous lot, which is to be expected with the more traditional processing. We held it in the roaster for marginally longer at the end, and we are loving the result in the cup.

Best Rested: 4+ weeks

Filter: 60g/L & 95°C, with rest we like to move down to 93°C

Espresso: Turbo shots + 3 weeks rest. 18g/48g+ & 20s // EXCELLENT SOUP

We’re tasting: Intensely perfumed floral aromatics - white rose, cherry blossom, magnolia blooms and wisteria. In the cup it's wildly juicy, we're getting grape hi-chew, milk bottle sweets, tropical soda, melon and peach. As it cools becoming more layered, with white tea, soursop, bergamot, & calamansi marmalade.

Traceability

Country of Origin:	Peru
Region:	Inkawasi, La Convención province, Cusco
Producer:	Wilber Tello
Farm:	Morada del Cafe
Variety:	SL9
Elevation:	2200 MASL
Process:	Traditional Washed: Ripe cherries very selectively picked, floated and pulped, with the parchment fermented in open tanks for 36 hrs before washing. The clean parchment is then laid out to dry on raised beds and dried slowly over 9 to 12 days, with a target moisture range of 10 to 11.5%.
Import Partner:	Nordic Approach
Harvest	Crop 25/26, Arrived UK: February 2026. New Purchasing Relationship

 

The Story

Wilber Tello farms within the Pacaybamba committee of the Incahuasi cooperative, which operates in the Inkawasi valley in La Convención province, Cusco.
His plot ("Morada del Cafe") sits at 2200 metres above sea level looking out on the Choqesafra mountain (seen in the illustration from Lucas)  and, like most holdings in the cooperative, covers around one and a half hectares. Wilber practises Kituchi, an ancestral cultivation method rooted in indigenous land stewardship that prioritises soil health and the maintenance of biodiversity, with native tree shade providing both canopy protection for the coffee and a cycle of organic matter back into the soil.

Incahuasi's communal processing stations are central to how the cooperative functions, providing shared infrastructure that allows individual smallholders to achieve consistency and quality control that would be very difficult to sustain independently. The cooperative model here is organised around ayni and minca, Andean principles of reciprocity and collective labour with Incan origins that shape not just the social fabric but the practical logistics of harvest and post-harvest work across member communities.

SL9: A recent research piece from Christopher Feran on SL9, traces it as a cultivar selected at Kenya's Scott Laboratories (the origins of SL-28 & SL-34) in the 1930s that was thought to have never been commercially distributed due to its susceptibility to Coffee Berry Disease. This variety was among Ethiopian-legacy germplasm potentially distributed to tropical research stations across the Americas, including Peru's Tingo Maria Experimental Station. Variety trials conducted from the 1950s onward saw this material planted across the surrounding highlands before spreading through the country as farmers migrated and propagated from seed. Buyers recognising distinctly Ethiopian cup characteristics naturally assumed it was Gesha, likely a Panamanian accession, and the name ("Inca Gesha") stuck - but it's now reaching international acclaim.

We can add something to this story. In 2019, our co-founder & head of coffee Alex travelled to Kenya on a sourcing trip with his previous employer. Having visited a dry mill, he asked for some Mbuni (tree dried cherries, picked end of season and sold on the internal market) from a station they had worked with - to bring back as a training aid for Stu, one of the other co-founders of Scenery and at the time, Barista trainer.

On a punt, they germinated some of those cherries - 2 out of 50 made it past the cotyledon leaf stage, and Alex kept one on. 7 years later, that tree has been kept alive - even producing a harvest of 500g of cherries that were processed and cupped at an event in Manchester in 2025. Having decided to send bean samples of Luis Camacho's Fragancia to be genetically tested, we included a leaf sample from the tree - now growing in the Scenery café. And it's come back as SL9 - which means we can say there is atleast one data-point for SL9 still being commercially cultivated in Kenya, adding to the variety history.

Peru has quietly been producing coffees of extraordinary quality for years, but the combination of improved traceability, stronger import partnerships, incredible growing conditions (especially extraordinarily high altitudes, which we will be exploring with future releases) and growing international attention on cultivars like SL9 means the country is entering a new phase of recognition.

Whisper it - but Peru is the new Panama. Not in the sense of over-capitalised rockstar farms with beaucoup premiums attached to the name, but in terms of an origin that we think is producing some of the best speciality coffee in the world right now.