Peru El Acerillo

Buy Peru El Acerillo here.

DIRECT TRADE PARTNER
Jhonny Saavedra and Cleotilde Guevara
Finca El Acerillo

REGION
San Ignacio, Cajamarca

CULTIVARS
Bourbon, Caturra

ELEVATION
1750-1819 m

HARVEST DATES
June-August 2021

LOOK FOR
Cocoa | Citrus | Plum

We have been sourcing smallholder coffees from northern Peru for well over a decade. Until we started working with the team from Origin Coffee Lab back in 2015, however, we were rarely able to access coffees from specific villages, to say nothing of single farms.

In an area where the dominant approach is to blend coffees from thousands of smallholder farms indiscriminately to aggregate large volumes, Origin moved decisively in the opposite direction, pursuing a strategy of lot separation and quality-based differentiation that is deeply aligned with our own approach to sourcing. Origin shares our belief that bigger is not necessarily better when it comes to coffee, and small can be beautiful. By isolating coffees from single farms or small villages and presenting them separately, Origin is able to preserve what makes the great ones great and avoid adulterating them with coffees of lower quality from other growers and communities.  This allows the team Origin to meet rising market demand for single-origin lots from Peru. It also enables them to deliver more value to the smallholder growers it serves — quality-focused growers like the husband-and-wife team of Jhonny Saavedra and Cleotilde Guevara, who are the reason the demand for Peruvian single-origins is rising in the first place.

Finca El Acerillo is a small farm at a soaring elevation in San Ignacio, the region from which we have sourced more single-origins than anywhere else in Peru. This is the first single-origin lot we have purchased from El Acerillo.

— Michael Sheridan
Director of Sourcing and Shared Value