Harvest Season

April marks the beginning of harvest season in the village of Los Patos, Amazonas, Peru. This season has been off to a slow start, but we are excited nonetheless. We have a couple of developments in processing that have us very excited! First, we rebuilt out raised drying bed so that it can dry a greater amount of coffee. Even, efficient drying can greatly improve the quality of coffee, and we expect that the rebuilt drying bed will help us to further improve this year’s crop. We have started “floating” beans prior to pulping. We don’t have extensive built infrastructure so we are doing this in a series of tubs and buckets, but this helps us to sort out “floaters” that are usually either over-ripe or under-ripe beans. This will help improve the flavor of the coffee you drink as well. The last development that we have for this year is the separation out of our peak season beans, which is a quality sort that will help us separate out what we expect the best beans of the season, so that we can offer you the best coffee.

We are also working on plans for improvements for next year. We are planning on building out enough drying beds to handle our full production. In addition we expect to start experimenting with a few different processing methods to see what flavors we can create in the cup. Right now all of our coffee would be considered fully washed. This means that the coffee is pulped, fermented overnight to loosen remaining mucilage, and then washed to remove the mucilage prior to drying. We are going to experiment with a honey/pulped natural process for some of our coffee. In a pulped natural process the coffee bean is pulped and dried with the mucilage remaining on the bean. Lastly, 2017 might be the first year where we are able to harvest from our Gesha varietal we planted  a couple years ago (although, there is a chance it might not produce until 2018). Our goal is to harvest and process this coffee separately, to determine how it cups differently from our other coffee. For those who might be unfamiliar with coffee varietals, Gesha is a varietal that derives from African heirloom varietals that was planted in Panama to impressive results.

It should be an exciting few years. Please contact us if you have any questions, suggestions, or just want to chat!