Kelvin Guerrero - La Esmeralda

A super smooth and creamy caramel fills this cup. A gentle plum fruitiness as it cools and a hint of nutmeg on the finish rounds out the easy drinking coffee.

This lot is a new partnership for Ozone and our first year buying from La Esmeralda. Our UK roastery has already roasted this lot, so this is the first time it’s been roasted here in New Zealand. We selected Kelvin Guerrero’s washed Catuai and Marshell from the countless samples that cross our cupping table because it simply stood out as a great tasting coffee. It has a noticeably different flavour profile to Irene Herrera’s La Mandarina which you can take a look at by clicking here, another Peruvian lot we’re roasting this season, even though the two farms are quite close together. Peruvian coffee has that kind of range.

The La Coipa district sits in the north-east corner of the Cajamarca region of Peru. It’s a fantastic coffee-producing area, home to Nima Juarez (El Roble and La Quebrada), whose coffee we’ve enjoyed in previous years, and Irene Herrera. It’s also home to El Horcon Comité, a small producer group that Kelvin is part of. Kelvin is young by wider coffee producer standards but typical in Peru, where younger farmers are quite common. His farm sits at 1,850 metres above sea level. He has processed this lot in a very classic way for the region, fully washed in a tiled tank and then sun dried.

He’s currently farming 2 hectares, planted predominantly with Catuai alongside a small amount of Marshell, a more recent addition to the farm.

Marshell’s origins are still being debated. The story starts in 1997, when Grimanés Morales Lizana spotted an unusual tree on her farm, La Lúcuma, in San Ignacio, Cajamarca. In 2011 a fungal disease called ojo de pollo badly affected the plantation, and that tree survived. She propagated from it and named it drawing on the names of her family members, including her father-in-law Marcelino. The most widely held view is that it’s a natural mutation of Bourbon. An alternative theory, backed by some genetic testing, suggests Marshell may be related to Costa Rica 95, a Catimor-group cultivar developed by ICAFE from Caturra and Timor Hybrid 832/1. No definitive published research has settled the question either way.

Marshell made its big entrance in 2019, when Grimanés won Cup of Excellence Peru with a washed lot from La Lúcuma. It scored 92.28 points, ahead of a Geisha blend and a Catuai. The official competition record lists the variety as Costa Rica 95, while most reporting at the time called it an unidentified Bourbon mutation. Since then, UK roaster Full Court Press has reported testing by RD2 Vision that identified its Marshell sample as a rare form of Catimor, and exporter Falcon Coffees has reported analysis identifying it as Costa Rica 95. Those are individual samples, though, and different farms could be growing genetically different trees under the same name. In the cup, Marshell from Cajamarca tends towards caramel, brown sugar, cola-like spice and stone fruit, and it often changes a lot as it cools.

Disease resilience is a big part of why farmers are planting it, though nobody has tested that in proper varietal trials yet. Many Peruvian farmers were encouraged to plant Catimor varietals through the mid-2010s by cooperatives, exporters and government programmes to help combat leaf rust and other diseases. Catimors divide opinion in the coffee community: partial Robusta genetics can lead to flat, vegetal cup profiles when not handled with care. If Marshell does turn out to be a Catimor, this lot is a reminder that they don’t have to.

We’ve written more about Marshell, and Nima Juarez’s lot from El Roble, on our Coffee Sourcing blog https://ozonecoffee.co.nz/blogs/coffee-sourcing/marshell-coffee-varietal

Coffee was first introduced to Peru via its northern neighbour Ecuador in the mid-18th century. Britain was one of the first countries to open diplomatic relations with an independent Peru, sending a consul-general in 1823. Peru had borrowed from British lenders to finance its war of independence and stopped paying within a few years. The debt rolled on for decades until the Grace Contract of 1889 handed Peru’s railways and a large land concession to British bondholders through the newly formed Peruvian Corporation. The Corporation planted coffee on its land in the Perené valley in Junín, which helped jumpstart Peruvian coffee’s international trade in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Coffee production in Peru began with large landholdings, mostly owned by wealthy European elites. But as workers migrated from other parts of Peru to provide labour on the farms, many began to farm independently on the abundant land across Cajamarca, Junín, Cusco and San Martín. Eventually the balance shifted as larger landholders departed, leaving small-scale “peasant” producers as the majority. Land reforms and government programmes in the 1950s and 60s further encouraged coffee cultivation, and small-scale, Indigenous farmers now produce most of the country’s coffee.

Today, around 375,000 hectares of Peru are planted with coffee, across 16 of the country’s 25 regions. Cajamarca grows the most, about 22% of the national crop, with San Martín, Junín and Amazonas close behind. More than 90% of it is grown by smallholders on farms smaller than 5 hectares. That structure means many Peruvian producers deal with the problems that come with smallholder farming: difficulty getting credit, access to milling, and running production efficiently. Producer groups like El Horcon Comité help spread the risk and pool the resources a small farm needs to run profitably. Much of Peru’s coffee is collected from small farms, then milled and marketed through cooperatives. Better traceability in recent years means we can buy more single-producer lots like this one. Peru’s weather service, SENAMHI, counts 38 different climate types across the country, so there’s a lot of regional character to find, and now we can put the name of the person who grew it on the bag.

Peru exports around 4.5 million 60kg bags of coffee a year, and it’s the world’s largest exporter of organic coffee. Roughly 90,000 hectares of Peruvian coffee farmland is certified organic, La Esmeralda included. The main reason is that most of the country’s coffee is grown by smallholders who don’t have the money for chemical inputs. That leaves farms exposed to coffee leaf rust, a threat climate change keeps making worse, in a country where pesticide and fungicide use is rare.