Here at Glen Lyon Coffee, Peru is one of our favourite coffee origins. In September, we made our second sourcing trip to the South American country, and this new Organic Salkantay is the result of that trip.
Organic Coffee from Savage Mountain
Although the ninth-largest exporter overall, Peru is the world’s largest exporter of organic-certified coffee: Across the country, organic coffee production takes place on 90,000 hectares. Certification is often handled by cooperatives, which have become integral to Peru’s coffee sector over the past few decades.
The Andean Cusco department in Peru’s south east is one of the country’s most important coffee-growing regions, and is where a lot of organic production takes place. This is the region we visited in September 2025, meeting with the organic-certified cooperative Huadquiña to build relationships and source coffee.
Huadquiña represents 300 coffee producers around the sleepy town of Santa Teresa, located high in the Andes and just a few kilometres from the ancient city of Machu Picchu. Santa Teresa sits in the Sacred Valley, a fertile region irrigated by the spectacular Urubamba river that was once the heart of the Incan empire. Huadquiña holds several organic certifications—from the EU, Japan, and the USDA—in addition to Fairtrade, and is also certified by the Latin American sustainability group IMOcert.
Santa Teresa is surrounded by some of the tallest peaks in the Andes. This coffee was grown on, and takes its name from, Salkantay, the highest mountain in the Andean Cordillera Vilcabamba that reaches some 6,271 metres. A fearsome snow-covered peak, its name often translates from the Quechua as “Savage Mountain”.
High Altitude and Citrusy-Sweet
Five Huadquiña producers contributed to this particular lot: Miguelina Perez Candia, Wilbert Cardenas Gamarra, Evelina Pereira De Carrion, Justino Chaco Huamanahue, and Emiliano Cardenas Gamarra. Their farms are all above 2,000 metres, with the highest reaching over 2,200 metres. This lot is made up of Tipica, Bourbon, and Gesha varieties, with coffees undergoing between 18-48 hour fermentations before being washed and dried on raised beds.
In the past, farms at the highest altitudes like the ones that make up this month’s coffee were actually too high and too cold to produce quality coffee. Now, however, as climate change takes hold and makes some low elevations unsuitable for coffee production, farms at or above 2,000 masl have ideal temperatures for speciality-grade coffee.
Huadquiña, which was founded in 1964, has offices and warehouses as well as a dry mill on the outskirts of Santa Teresa. Among their 300 members are several Cup of Excellence competition winners, and an onsite QC team makes sure the quality of coffee is very high, with most cupping above an 86 (speciality grade is considered anything above 80). You might remember a coffee we sourced last year from Armando Sanchez Ramirez. Armando’s daughter Diana works at Huadquiña’s dry mill, and is one of three expert Q graders that the cooperative employs to ensure that the coffee they sell is of the highest quality.
The cooperative has three collection points around the region, and each boasts a slightly different flavour profile, representing Peru’s diversity of coffee flavours even in a small area. Coffees from Sacsara or Vilcanota might taste more nutty or creamy compared to this one, collected at Salkantay, which is known for its citrusy and sweet coffees—we get notes of orange, honey, and cherry. Delicious!
