CafExporto
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.
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 8 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.
Typica ‘Mejorado’
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.
Natural Typica
This lot is a traditional natural Typica, dried in Juan’s plastic-covered drying ‘rooms’. Here, humidity and temperature are measured constantly, with windows opened and fans started by farm manager Segundo when values start to creep up. The overall drying process takes 20-30 days, and creates a very clean representation of the Typica varietal, with florals shining through more typical natural process notes of stone fruit and a creamy milk chocolate like mouthfeel.
This year we selected several lots from Hacienda La Papaya. Read more about some of the other lots below.
