It’s a great joy to welcome back onto the coffee menu an exceptionally well processed lot of Bourbon from 2,000 metres in Peru’s Cusco region, produced by Miranda Huaman Gregoria. Expect a balanced cup with an array of fruity, herbal and sugary characteristics.
The Producer:
Miranda Huaman Gregoria has been working in coffee for 36 years. In the last 8 she has been in partnership with the Valle Inca Association, headed up by José Prundencio. She tends to Bourbon coffee trees on her 5-hectare farm, Mesapata, which are about a dozen years old. Being situated at 2,000 metres above sea level means that both Broca (coffee borer beetle) and Roya (coffee leaf rust) are not hugely problematic.
Their Approach:
Miranda has planted Pacay trees on her farm, to provide shade for the coffee plants as well as to encourage biodiversity. As well as coffee she is producing small peppers known locally as Rocoto. The coffee plants are nourished with a homemade compost, composed primarily of spent coffee pulp and bird poo. In processing her harvested coffee cherries, she first floats in water to skim off the less dense fruit. They are then fed through a manual disc depulper to remove the seed from the fruit. The depulped parchment is sieved to remove any coffee cherry skins. Experimenting in their approach to fermentation, they place the mucilage laden parchment coffee into GrainPro sacks and then seal in a plastic barrel. A tube allows for degassing, as the microbiome breaking down the coffee's mucilage produces CO2 during this stage. After nearly 40 hours the fermented coffee is fully washed in clean water, which is then treated in wells. The parchment coffee is then placed onto raised beds in a parabolic dried to slowly dry down to a stable moisture content over around 18 days. In recent years Miranda has also been producing some honey processed lots.
The Association:
In 2018, our first year buying coffee through Valle Inca, the group had around 100 members. Thanks to word of mouth, with producers telling their neighbours of the premium prices that they were able to receive having been able to access a more discerning coffee market through the association, the group now works with around 300 producers in the Cusco region and have recently expanded their operations to include Puno. All the members are working organically and are certified as such via the Valle Inca group. For a member to join, there needs to be a baseline of quality met, dictated in part by altitude and the type of varieties planted, but ultimately it is down to the desire of each member to improve their quality through hard work. The group provides agronomical advice and training as well as pre-financing, so the farmer members are supported in multiple ways. Several of their members reliably place well in Peru’s Cup of Excellence competition.
