Café Imports, our importing partner, has foreseen the potential of Peru – specifically the northern region of Cajamarca. Peiro Cristani, Café Imports Senior Green Buyer, and Rony Lavan of Lima Coffee Exporting have been working with farmers to improve quality protocols and establish a micro-lot program in Cajamarca. They have achieved with this investment and support some dramatic quality improvements, specifically dominating the first Cup of Excellence (COE) in Peru with coffees from Cajamarca.

This lot is a regional lot from 400 smallholder farms in Cajamarca that have benefited from the investment and development provided by Café Imports and Lima Coffee. A significant change in the process is incentivizing the delivery of cherry to a mill instead of drying on the farm. Encouraging the farmers to deliver cherry allows the mill to manage the drying and sorting of the harvest, improving the quality. This coffee is a testament to the innovation and collaboration that is a result of Café Imports’ work in Cajamarca. Blueprint is privileged to share the results of this work with you.

Peruvian coffee is evolving. When reflecting on the source of this quality-evolution a few words come to mind: awareness, innovation and collaboration. Quality improvements like picking, sorting and better milling protocol never stick if farmers do not embrace them and/or lack the support of dedicated collaborators. It might be surprising to some, but most farmers aren’t aware of the growing and evolving specialty coffee market around the world. Loosely defined, specialty coffee is any coffee that scores 84+ points using an SCA cupping form by a certified Q-grader. Awareness of this market is just the beginning, usually requiring a collaborator to connect to the market and help establish the improvements that garner better quality and higher prices. Innovation also never occurs unless investment is connected to it. This can be human investment, like consultation and training, or a financial investment in materials to establish the project, or pre-financing to support better practices, like ripe picking.

We offered this lot as a regular coffee in late 2017/early 2018, and also are now offering it as a decaffeinated version as well. Part of the lot was decaffeinated at the Mountain Water decaffeination facility on the way up from Peru.