An altitude graph of our trip to Peru would be as jagged as the Andes mountains that run through the country. This was a whirlwind adventure very kindly laid on by PromPeru to encourage foreign trade and I was one of a lucky number of coffee and cacao buyers from North America and Europe invited along for the trip. Within a space of five days we had gone from sea level Lima up to Cusco at 3,400m, then back down to 80% humidity in Puerto Maldonado in deepest Amazonia before heading through a 4,300m high Andean pass to the cool little coffee towns of Quillabamba and Santa Teresa.
But first was Expoamazonica in Puerto Maldonado. A fun, laid back jungle city on the shores of the vast Madre de Dios River, Puerto Maldonado started life as a rubber boom town. Today it's an important tourist hotspot as a jumping off place for jungle tours. Taking a taxi here means hopping onto the back of one of the tooting, ubiquitous motorbike rickshaws that buzz about the town. This is the biodiversity capital of Peru, a fact that hit home when I discovered that we had no less than 10 sloths in our hotel’s grounds!
Early the following morning we were driven to the outskirts of town to an enormous, freshly constructed conference centre to meet with various producers. The following few hours felt a little like speed dating. I was given a desk and a list of meetings with allotted half hour spots for a coffee producer to tell me about their coffee and for me to convince them that despite the wild looking hair (humidity and jet lag were taking their toll I tell you) and my lack of business cards (HUGE mistake) that I was indeed a coffee roaster from Scotland and keen to source lots delicious Peruvian coffee. Night fell, as it does in the tropics, in a sudden black out. With business concluded for the evening, an amazing open sided warehouse with stalls selling everything from indigenous crafts to agricultural machinery buzzed with activity, a live band blasted out musica tropical, dozens of fires were lit over which whole lambs were roasted. Pisco sours might have been drunk.
Back in the Andes the following day and by now accustomed to the thin air helped by cups of coca tea, we had a wonderful few hours exploring Cusco. These high Andean cities are some of my favourite places on earth (I worked for years as a journalist in La Paz in Bolivia, just across the border). But it’s Cusco, the archaeological capital of the Americas, that is deservedly one of South America’s most popular destinations. This buzzing city, the oldest continually inhabited city in the Americas, centres around the Plaza de Armas. This was the original religious and administrative centre of the Incan Empire but by 1533 the conquistadors had claimed it as their own. The Spanish plundered the city and built their catholic churches and administrative buildings on the stone foundations of the original Incan buildings. Much of Cusco’s narrow, often stepped, central streets today are lined with a seamless blend of Incan built stone walls and Spanish colonial architecture. A number of speciality coffee shops occupy these streets proudly serving up delicious gesha and bourbon pourovers from well known Peruvian coffee farms. I could have happily spent a week here soaking up the atmosphere under the fierce Andean sun.
The journey from Cusco to the coffee lands beyond took us through the Sacred Valley via Urubamba and Ollantaytambo. We passed fields of maize, potato and artichoke. Young girls with brightly striped blankets on their backs led donkeys by the roadside. Large, laid back dogs, often dressed in T shirts basked in the warmth of the Andean sun. Eucalyptus trees and half built red breeze block buildings dotted the edges of the villages. For a while we had been following the train line that runs out of Cusco to Machu Picchu but we soon turned away and headed for the mountains whose high, snow capped peaks disappeared into the clouds far above us.
Breaking the journey at a roadside shack we ate choclo con queso - hot corn on the cob served with slab of salty farmhouse cheese. Soon the road ascended into an alarming series of hairpin bends. On the most treacherous corners stood small crosses with the names and dates of those who had presumably plummeted to their deaths below. The familiar weariness of high altitude kicked in as we continued our ascent to the steady beat of cumbia coming from the radio until we arrived at the famous 14,100 ft Abra Malaga pass. The scenery at this high point had taken on a distinctly Scottish air. The treeless, windswept hills were shrouded in mist and drizzle and all that seemed missing were some sheep and perhaps a little more oxygen. As the road began its winding descent into the increasingly luscious Urubamba valley below, we all perked up with the blissfully oxygenated air and soaked up the lush green world outside filled with waterfalls, coffee and fruit trees.
The hot, laid back town of Quillabamaba, about 5 hours from Cusco, provides a central hub for the coffee, cacao and tropical fruits that are harvested in the region. Warehouses and dry mills line the wide streets as large trucks piled high with coffee and other produce rumble through town.
We were treated to a cupping table of delicious organic lots at the Cocla Cooperative in town.Cocla, one of Peru’s biggest cooperatives, is an umbrella organisation for 21 independent cooperatives. It works with a total of 3,500 families in the region and helps organise logistics and shipping as well as carrying out quality control and providing technical help with harvest and post harvest processing to producers. They are also organically certified. Organic certification doesn't always necessarily go hand in hand with quality in the world of specialty coffee but here in Peru it’s beyond exciting that so many delicious, high quality coffees also carry an organic certification.
Most of Quillabamba’s restaurants spill out into the open air and, still buzzing after our cupping, we feasted on platefuls of barbecued chicken, rice and ceviche washed down with jarras of homemade lemonade and passion fruit juice. Honestly the fresh food in Peru has to be some of the best I’ve ever tasted and I hadn't appreciated the sheer abundance and variety of fresh fruit here that’s never even seen outside of the country.
The following day we weaved along a vertiginous dirt road following the Urubamba river to the wonderful little coffee town of Santa Teresa. Just 8 miles from Machu Picchu, Santa Teresa has become a popular stopping off point on the alternative trekking route to the ‘Lost City’. Here, on the outskirts of town, Huadquiña Cooperative is currently celebrating its 60th anniversary. The cooperative works with 310 producers across four valleys that include regular Cup of Excellence winners. At the moment Huadquiña exports 20 containers a year but are looking to increase this to 70. Almost half of the coffee coming out of this cooperative is of 84+ quality. We cupped some absolutely gorgeous lots with Diana and her QC team in the co-op’s lab which undoubtedly has some of the best views of a cupping lab in South America with large picture windows looking out across to the incredible mountains behind Machu Picchu.
We drove deeper into coffee country heading up to visit Dwight Aguila at his beautiful, biodynamic farm Finca Nueva Alianza where the harvest was in its final days. Dwight and his parents before him have been farming these 8 hectares for 24 years now. Dwight is passionate about biodynamic farming methods and his farm is famed for its incredible yellow gesha. With its abundance of shade and fruit trees, including papaya, banana and avocado, this is one of the most beautiful coffee farms I have visited and it was a real treat to have Dwight show us around accompanied by his sweet dogs. Later when we cupped his yellow gesha back in a lab in Santa Teresa we were blown away by the stunning jasmine and passion fruit notes in the cup.
We love roasting coffee from Peru here at Glen Lyon and this trip has helped us to be able to strengthen direct producer relationships from the Cusco Region (watch this space!) Now back in Aberfeldy (a mere 300ft above sea level) with a case full of green coffee samples and an armful of mosquito bites (coffee farm bugs are ferocious), I can’t wait to discover more of the delicious coffee that this phenomenal country has to offer.
