Ecuador

Hacienda La Papaya

240 hr Anaerobic Pulp Typica

A wild and deeply complex Anaerobic Typica, shaped by Juan Peña’s meticulous approach in Saraguro, Southern Ecuador.

Produced by Juan Peña, an agricultural engineer based in southern Ecuador.

Producer
Juan Peña
Coffee expression
A floral & wild coffee

Regular price: $25.00
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Sale price: $25.00
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Expert processing leads to an incredible depth and complexity of flavour, while maintaining a clean expression, and still showcasing the floral characteristics we connect with Typica.

Juan Peña

Hacienda La Papaya

Hacienda La Papaya is located just outside the town of Saraguro, in the Loja region of Southern Ecuador. The Hacienda has been in Juan’s family since the end of colonial rule, and is a place that holds great importance for the whole family, having spent their summers there since they were children. Juan began to experiment with coffee here in 2010, and moved to work in coffee full time in 2014 after his rose crop was wiped out by a violent storm in Cuenca. Over the intervening years he has thrown himself into the pursuit of high quality coffee, with a meticulous and scientific approach.

This approach, shaped by Juan’s experience in roses and his training as an agricultural engineer, has led to an astronomic rise to high quality and international recognition, over just 7 years. His obsessive experimentation and need for scientific evidence is a cornerstone of his work at each stage, from carefully applied and monitored fertilisation, constant measurement of brix and cherry weight during harvest, innovation in careful fermentation, to the exacting drying process. Juan’s work in each of these fields is truly some of the most meticulous and effective we have seen in our years of travelling for coffee, and we left the Hacienda in awe.

We visited Juan and his team in November 2021.

We’ve been able to taste the ever improving results of Juan’s work over the years; top-quality micro-lots with wildly varying flavour profiles and expressions. Juan mainly grows Typica ‘Mejorado’, or improved Typica, first grown on Nestle’s experimental farms in the north of Ecuador. Juan puts much of his success down to the combination of high yield and incredible cup quality that these Mejorado plants provide. The Hacienda is also home to plots of Mejorado’s Nestle sibling Sidra, and a very limited amount of Geisha, while a small plot of Pacamara near the top of the farm is awaiting its first big harvest. This lot is from Juan’s Typica Mejorado trees, fermented in plastic tanks without oxygen for 10 days, or 240 hours. These plastic tanks are kept very clean, but fermentation juices are added from previous anaerobic batches, in a similar concept to a sourdough starter, in order to kickstart the fermentation with an existing culture of bacteria and yeast, pushing in the desired direction and leading to greater consistency.

For this lot, processed specifically for us, Juan added an extra dose of coffee pulp to the tank, freshly removed from a lot of washed Typica. This adds fuel for the fermentation, leading to extra complexity, but without allowing the fermentation to move on to oxidise ethanol and create acetic acid. These acetic flavours often lead to taints in the cup, so avoiding these allows Juan to create incredible complexity while maintaining a clean and floral expression. We’re more than proud of our relationship with a true trailblazer like Juan, and are grateful for the opportunity to share this small lot, processed exclusively for us, with our preferences in mind.

Four unique coffees

Fractal

This Christmas we’re releasing an exclusive bundle of coffees, a combination that showcases quality and depth of flavour. These four exclusive lots have been sourced specifically for this project, from our partners at origin. Produced by masters in the field, these four coffees push the boundaries of coffee flavour.

Buy as bundle

Technical Data

Producer
Juan Peña
Region
Loja
Altitude
2000 masl
Varietal
Typica
Process
Anaerobic
Harvest
September 2022

Anaerobic Process

The coffee is first pulped mechanically, removing most of the fruit, as with a white honey process. The parchment coffee and almost gel-like mucilage are then packed tightly into a small fermentation tank, and sealed with almost no oxygen present. As the fermentation starts to occur, carbon dioxide is produced, creating a completely anaerobic environment, and also high pressure within the tank. This affects coffee flavour in two ways.

An anaerobic environment favours a very different set of fermenting bacteria and yeast, leading to a dominant lacto-fermentation. The pressure also forces coffee juices into the seed itself, adding more fermentable sugars to continue the process. The coffee is then dried with the mucilage still attached, as with a honey processed coffee. All of this adds layers of complexity to the final cup.