We’re excited to continue our collaboration with Juan Peña, owner of Hacienda La Papaya and Cafexporto. Since meeting in Aarhus in 2015, we have purchased many small experimental lots, continuing a conversation through high quality coffee. Over the past two years, Juan has expanded his work, exporting more Hacienda La Papaya coffee to Europe together with us, and starting the CafExporto project, working with farms across Ecuador. We are more than excited to expand our collaboration with Juan, and to share his excellent work with a wider audience. We were able to visit Juan and his team in November 2021, both at the Hacienda and at CafExporto’s base in the nearby city of Cuenca, towards the very end of harvest.

Oak Barrel Typica

This hard work and innovation is also clear when tasting Juan’s coffees; top-quality micro-lots, with wildly varying flavour profiles and expressions. Juan mainly grows Typica ‘Mejorado’, the enhanced version of the varietal, 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 oak barrels for 5 days. These oak barrels were previously used to age Ecuadorean rum for over 20 years, so have a rich microbiota. This means that the coffee fermentation is pushed in a rather different direction than if it was dominated by the coffee’s native microbiota, creating a very different expression of Juan’s Typica.

For this lot, processed specifically for us, Juan also 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 expression. The expression is deeper, richer and more complex; the acidity is a little lower, with fresh fruit character softening into rich dried fruit.