Peru Yolanda Alvarez Microlot

Farming Notes

We are pleased to welcome Yolanda Cabrera Alvarez’s coffee back for a second straight year.

Through our relationships with Red Fox and Rachel Stanich, we were able to bring Yolanda’s coffee back to our customers as the most requested coffee of all time.

Here’s what Red Fox said about Yolanda’s coffee:

“Yolanda Cabrera Alvarez has been producing coffee for over 32 years and a member of Valle

Inca for 3 years. We are excited to offer Yolanda’s coffee as a first-time quality separation.

Nestled in the Yanatile Valley in the Department of Cusco in the south of Peru, Valle Inca functions as a producer group where Prudencio Vargas Saenz, who created and runs the group, buys parchment from farmers, reinvesting premiums in the community’s infrastructure to help them continue to improve quality. Prudencio, who lives in nearby Calca and brings the benefits of his former experience as an agricultural loan officer, once operated outside the aegis of a collective, but after years of running Valle Inca informally, he formalized the organization this year in order to gain organic certification, Fair Trade certification and the ability to export on his own.

Member-wise, Valle Inca is growing fast with 101+ farmers currently in the fold. It’s no surprise that more and more farmers want to work with Valle Inca. In the community, Prudencio is known for his honesty, trustworthiness, dedication and drive to invest and reinvest in his community, genuinely engaging their goals and concerns. He also pays higher prices than farmers had access to prior to the founding of Valle Inca, which has helped to improve quality as well as overall community health over time.

Leaders like Prudencio are rare, and the quality of connection between leadership and producer

shines through in the cup. At their best, coffees from Valle Inca display elegant honeyed florals, crisp red apple, and a pleasant tannic quality like oolong tea. These coffees cup beautifully, but where they really shine is in a brewed cup off the production roaster. And while they have a lot to offer specialty professionals in the way of nuance, they’re also wonderfully approachable for consumers.

One of the things that makes Valle Inca so exciting is that there’s still so much untapped potential there. There are many more hills and mountain peaks where producers we haven’t yet connected with are growing great coffee; and Prudencio is working hard to find them and bring them into the specialty market. Right now, Valle Inca is producing an exceptional amount of beautiful 85–86-point regional quality coffee. Going forward we expect to see even more 86–87+ lots. In fact, a lot of the coffees we’ve purchased this year are actually out-scoring themselves as they mature post-harvest.

Over the last four years, Valle Inca has grown alongside us. From our first year where we bought two lots from Valle Inca, to the present year where we’re lucky enough to have over 1,000 bags from them, they’ve never ceased to impress us. We look forward to seeing what the future holds for Valle Inca and are excited about the coffees this harvest has yielded.”

As always, we are extremely grateful for our friends at origin working tirelessly to produce the most amazing coffees.