This elegant cup opens with a burst of tangerine followed by strawberry fondants and a spoonful of brown sugar. As it finishes, there's a little lime juice and a delicate floral note too.
We were cupping Cajamarca samples with the Origin Coffee Lab team, our exporters in Jaén, looking for something to fill a gap in this year's Peru offering. One washed Marshell kept standing out for its clarity. Then they told us who'd grown it. Irene Herrera, and Roland knew the name straight away, because he'd eaten lunch at her house.
That was back in 2022, on his first trip to Peru. He went out to La Coipa with the Origin Coffee Lab crew, into the north-east corner of Cajamarca, which is serious coffee country. Nima Juarez farms there, at El Roble and La Quebrada, and so does Kelvin Guerrero at La Esmerelda. We've bought from both. They walked past farm after farm through the morning and finished up at the house of Milciades Minga, head of the Gallitos de Rocas comité. Milciades is a carpenter as well as a farmer, and the house is a bit bigger than its neighbours. Coffee dries on the top floor. Living space and kitchen below. Guinea pigs, cuy, live in a pen indoors, the way sheep never quite manage back home. Irene put on a big lunch, and there was a fruit punch mixed up in a barrel with yonke, the local cane spirit. Irene is Milciades' wife. La Mandarina is hers.
The farm starts behind the kitchen and goes up. From 1,750 metres to 2,000, so a 250 metre climb bottom to top, about the same rise as walking up Rangitoto, except on a much steeper line. Roland reports he struggled to keep pace with Irene. She grows Caturra, Marshell and Bourbon, with a small nursery of young plants going in for future seasons, and this lot is Marshell only, picked from those trees and kept separate. The trees flower October to December, so they're in blossom while we're heading into summer. Harvest runs May to September, peaking June to August. Everything is picked selectively, as it usually is in Peru, then washed: depulped, fermented in tank for 24 to 36 hours, washed, and dried in solar dryers for 10 to 15 days.
Nobody has settled where Marshell comes from. The most common account has it as a natural mutation of Bourbon, spotted in 1997 by a farmer called Grimanés Morales Lizana on her farm in San Ignacio, Cajamarca. Disease came through and wiped out the trees around it. That one kept going, so she propagated from it and named it after her family, including her father-in-law Marcelino. The other theory, with some genetic testing behind it, links Marshell to Costa Rica 95, a Catimor-group cultivar ICAFE developed from Caturra and Timor Hybrid 832/1. No published research has closed the case.
Both accounts agree on the disease resistance, which is why it's here at all. Through the mid-2010s, cooperatives, exporters and government programmes pushed Peruvian farmers hard toward Catimor varieties to hold back leaf rust. Catimors have a reputation in the trade for cupping flat and vegetal, and plenty of the time that reputation is earned. Handled properly, they can taste like this instead.
That's the other thing about this part of the world. Peru is the world's biggest exporter of organic coffee, with roughly 90,000 hectares certified, and La Mandarina is one of them. The reason is less about certification strategy than about arithmetic. Most Peruvian coffee is grown by smallholders who never had the money for chemical inputs in the first place, so organic was the starting position rather than a switch. It leaves the country badly exposed to leaf rust, which climate change keeps making worse, in a place where fungicide use is rare.
- Country: Peru
- Region: Cajamarca
- District: La Coipa
- Producer: Irene Herrera
- Farm: La Mandarina
- Altitude: 1,750 to 2,000 m.a.s.l.
- Variety: Marshell
- Processing: Washed
- Fermentation: 24 to 36 hours in tank
- Drying: Solar dryers, 10 to 15 days
- Certification: Organic