Story
Over the past few years, Juan Peña has become a prominent figure in the coffee industry. Season after season, he is up for awards as a notable coffee producer, and his coffee has been on the national and world stage in the hands of competitors. It would be easy to believe that Juan has been growing coffee for many decades, but Juan began growing coffee just eleven years ago. Juan’s farm, Hacienda a Papaya, chose to diversify their crop after a disastrous rose harvest, and choosing to experiment with coffee took them down the path to become a prominent producer of Ecuadorian coffee. His rise to prominence has been multifaceted, although it’s mostly due to his scientific approach to growing and processing his coffees. Each step of harvest is well documented and adjusted from season to season. This care is evident in the cup, this Anaerobic natural Typica exudes clear terroir of Ecuador coffee, as well as complex sweetness and floral notes from processing. We made contact with Juan Peña from a conversation online, during a transition time for the coffees of Hacienda La Papaya. The formation of CafExporto has brought a level of control that Juan sought out from the outset of his coffee career, and has provided us with direct access to his meticulously processed coffees.
NATURALLY PROCESSED COFFEE
Natural coffees are beautiful… Okay, natural coffees are beautiful when done properly, but can be equally terrible when things go wrong. Natural processing, or dry processing, refers to the act of drying and fermenting coffee inside the cherry. Long before the age of portafilter tattoos and dual-boiler home espresso machines, coffee was picked and dried this way out of convenience. It is, to this day, still the most convenient and economically friendly way to process coffee cherries. (It’s estimated that dry-processing can use up to 90% less water than the washing process.) So why isn’t all coffee processed this way? Well, as coffee made its way across the world, it was commoditized and standardized, just like all other products spread by colonialism, but that’s a whole other story... Adding to the boom of washed processing, the natural process method can be tricky to get right, due to the delicate nature of fermentation and drying. What does all this have to do with the final cup? Well, when you leave the skin and fruit of the coffee cherry on the seed throughout fermentation and drying, that fruit begins to break down, imparting esters that influence delicate florals and big fruit notes into the seed that survive the roasting process. If it’s rushed or handled incorrectly, this fruit rot can lend off-flavors to the coffee, making the final cup dirty or ‘fermenty.’ Basically that single cherry begins to slowly decay, and controlling that delicate action through advanced technique and metrics allow us, lucky folks, to drink wonderfully floral and fruity coffees. We have long promoted natural processed coffees, and this natural Gesha from Juan Pena is just one of the reasons we do.