Finca Palmira is a coffee farm we have loved buying from for many years. This season the farm is under new custodianship with Ruben Nieble taking the reins, after his wife Yolanda’s passing last year.
The Farm
Palmira is a 4-hectare farm, previously overseen by Yolanda Cabrera Alvarez, but is now tended to by Ruben Flores Nieble. Coffees from the farm have placed well in the Peruvian Cup of Excellence competition, a testament to the dedication and hard work undertaken each season.
Their Approach
The farm is situated at a staggering 2,200 metres, and is planted out with Typica and Caturra coffee trees, which are kept separate during harvest. Over the years we have bought and roasted Caturra selections from Palmira, but this year and last we have been featuring their Typica. The agronomical approach undertaken is completely organic, with Ruben making compost to fertilise the coffee trees which are shaded by Pacay trees and planted amongst secondary food crops like corn and passionfruit.
What first stood out to us when we cupped their coffee in the Valle Inca lab in Peru was the intensity of fruit characteristics in the cup, and speaking with José and his agronomists we learnt that they are using a novel, water-chilled extended fermentation processing method.
After manually depulping the coffee cherries the sugary, mucilage-covered parchment coffee is bound up in GrainPro sacks, which are then left to ferment. If they leave the fermentation uncontrolled the hot days and cold nights experienced on the farm mean that the fermentation profile is stilted and can swing from 24C to 60C over 24 hours, leading to alcoholic, banana-like aromas developing.
In 2019 they trialled holding the sealed bags of coffee in a tiled tank, which is drip-fed natural spring water that acts as a cooling mechanism, to maintain a more consistent temperature throughout the day. At night they remove the bags from the tank and keep them close together, to maintain some residual warmth from the day. After anywhere between 35 and 49 hours they open the bags and check the aroma and feel the parchment, and rather than banana they experience more fruity pineapple and passionfruit like aromas using this fermentation method. Once the parchment is slippery and smooth the mucilage is deemed sufficiently broken down, and they fully wash the coffee before drying from 10 to 15 days on raised beds in covered polytunnels. The water used for washing the coffee is treated in wells.
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 over 375 producers in the Cusco region and have grown their operations to Puno and other producing areas.
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 Valle Inca’s members repeatedly place well in Peru’s Cup of Excellence competition.
We remain in touch with José Prudencio, the group’s president, throughout the year to hear how they are progressing and to maintain an open dialogue.
