Our new True North (and April’s subscription coffee) is particularly special: Glen Lyon founder and green buyer Fiona purchased it direct through the Huadquiña Cooperative on the slopes of Machu Picchu during her recent trip to Peru.
Coffee from Savage Mountain
Don Armando Ramírez Sánchez is an organic coffee producer whose farm, Finca Miscabamba, is located in the mountains of Cusco. He grows coffee at altitudes of up to 2,350 metres above sea level in the Salkantay river basin in the Peruvian Andes, not far from Machu Picchu.
Salkantay is the highest and most important mountain in the Cordillera Vilcabamba. A hiking trail on the mountain has been named among the 25 best treks in the world, but it is not for the faint of heart: Salkantay is often translated from Quechua as “Savage Mountain”.
When Don Armando was a child, his parents tried to grow coffee on the site but were unsuccessful due to the altitude. An ironic ripple effect of climate change and hotter temperatures means that higher altitude farms like his are now able to produce quality coffee.
Don Armando has been growing the gesha coffee variety since 2000—he was given a handful of seeds, planted them, and only found out later that they were the prized variety. He has increased the number of gesha trees over the years, and thanks to their flourishing has placed several times in prestigious green coffee competitions such as Peru’s Cup of Excellence.
This particular coffee is a fully washed lot made up of multiple varieties, including gesha, and which Fiona bought direct from the Huadquiña cooperative during her coffee sourcing trip to Peru last year. Huadquiña is a small co-op, established in 1964 and boasting 310 members who mostly grow coffee at extreme altitude in the Andes.
The Importance of Cooperatives
Cooperatives are an integral part of Peruvian coffee’s history and modern economics, but this has not always been the case. As a result of colonial land capture and geopolitical machinations in the late 1800s, for much of the next century most coffee farms in Peru were huge plantations owned by European elites.
Labour was provided by urban peasants who migrated to the countryside in search of jobs, as well as indigenous Peruvians who had often previously farmed the land they now worked. It was only in the post-colonial, post-World War II era that government reforms saw the break up of the large landholdings and their redistribution back to the people.
On the plus side, this gave thousands of Peruvian smallholder farmers independence and autonomy when it came to coffee production; however, the remote nature of coffee farming meant that many were left on their own to figure out the processing and selling.
To assist them, successive governments focused on creating producer cooperatives. These co-ops would help farmers with centralised processing, milling, and leveraging economies of scale and bargaining power to help with market access. During the 1970s, upwards of 80% of Peruvian coffee exports were handled by cooperatives.
Today some of these co-ops are genuinely huge, representing thousands of smallholder farmers and their families. Although, like many large organisations, certain co-ops haven’t always worked in the best interest of their members, the majority have been extremely beneficial by helping with education as well as sustainability and coffee quality improvements.
Small on Land, Big on Sustainability
Like most other Peruvian coffee producers, Don Armando’s farm is small, just two hectares, but he has a keen focus on sustainability, practising agroforestry and diversifying with avocado and passion fruit. His farm has organic and Fairtrade certification, and he even has bee hives around the perimeter. This commitment dovetails nicely with our positive impact coffee, True North, where we raise £1 in each retail bag for Trees for Life’s work to re-wild the Scottish Highlands
Sustainability is also important to the wider Peruvian coffee industry. The country is the world's largest exporter of organic coffee, with roughly 90,000 hectares certified organic. In addition, a large portion of the country's coffee is organic by default, which has been attributed to the number of smallholder farmers who lack the capital to invest in chemicals.
To improve both quality and sustainability, Huadquiña has four technical advisors on staff to help farmers with processing and production assistance. It also has its own Q grader—simply put, the coffee equivalent of a sommelier—who just happens to be Don Armando’s daughter, Diana.
We’ve had some great luck with coffees from Peru in recent years, and this lot is no different. We’re very excited to bring this coffee from the vertiginous heights of Don Armando’s farm to the comparatively lowly altitudes of Highland Scotland.
