Peru - Elzer García Ticlahuanca

12 GBP

We have a philosophy for roasting. That there's the platonic ideal form of a coffee's flavour expression (for each individual preference) - and that roasting can only ever reveal an imperfect version of that. That we as roasters can only ever make a coffee worse, never better than that perfect ideal - and so our goal is to minimise that gap, striving for our best version of it. This coffee is the platonic ideal of a washed Caturra. Grown under shade at a stunning 2400 MASL in Jaén, this is a peak coffee for us - delicious and with minimal intervention needed, absolutely sessionable, we could (and are) guzzling this by the mug. Brew Guide Best Brewed with: Filter Lightest Roaster Influence: This coffee is SUPER dense with super clean processing, so we're absolutely whacking it with heat, treating it closer to an Ethiopian washed than anything else on the menu - incredibly fast roasting, with just a touch of extra time at the end of the roast to ensure it's cleanly developed. Best Rested: 3-4 weeks Filter: 60g/L & 96°C, with rest we like to move down to 91°C Espresso: Turbo shots + 3 weeks rest. 18g/46g+ & 18s We’re tasting: Sweet buttery aromatics reminding us of freshly baked apple crumble. In the cup it's beautifully sweet + plush - with clementine juice aromatics and acidity, white muscat grape, a buttery pastry note that reminds of vanilla danish pastries, with gentle hints of stonefruit. As it cools the sweetness reminds us of panela (raw sugar), and there's a long stewed apple note in the finish. Traceability Country of Origin:: Peru Region:: La Unión, Sallique, Jaén, Cajamarca Producer:: Elzer García Ticlahuanca Farm:: La Shapa Variety:: Caturra Elevation:: 2380 - 2450 MASL Process:: Traditional Washed: Cherries are selectively harvested by hand, before pulping. Parchment coffee is dry fermented in tanks for 72 to 96 hrs (with cooler temperatures at altitude, fermentations run colder and longer) before washing. The now squeaky clean parchment is slowly patio dried, with careful temperature management. Import Partner:: Chacra Harvest: Crop 25/26, Arrived UK: January 2026. New Purchasing Relationship The Story Elzer Garcia's Finca La Shapa sits at a whopping 2400 MASL in Sallique, Cajamarca. Arabica evolved in the high altitude Afromontane cloud forests of southwestern Ethiopia, and the species' physiology is still tuned to those conditions today. It wants daytime temperatures in a narrow , cool nights but emphatically no frost, and the closer to the equator you grow it the higher up the mountain you have to go to find that . Warmer conditions push the plant to grow and fruit faster, but at the cost of heat stress, accelerated maturation that compresses flavour development, and far greater exposure to pest and disease pressure (most notably roya, the leaf rust that has reshaped the entire region's coffee map over the past decade). Cooler high-altitude conditions slow everything down, giving the cherry months longer on the branch to load sugars and acids into the seed. Northern Peru sits at a similar latitudinal band to coffee's birthplace, which is why both regions push viable arabica production to comparable altitudes. The Huancabamba Depression, the structural break where the northern Peruvian Andes drop and fragment, provides the inter-Andean valleys, water sources and microclimate needed to have viable farmland this high up. Caturra is a natural dwarf mutation of Bourbon, discovered on a plantation in Minas Gerais, Brazil in the early twentieth century, and selected and stabilised by the Instituto Agronômico de Campinas through the 1930s. The compact growth habit meant farmers could plant more trees per hectare and harvest them more easily, which is how Caturra became the workhorse cultivar of Latin American coffee through the second half of the twentieth century. It's a benchmark for quality but rarely the most exciting thing on the offer - there's a reason "BWC: Boring Washed Caturra" (truly it's non-pejorative) has become almost the yard-stick to which all other lots are measured against. At extreme altitudes, though, the wide swing between warm days and cold nights slows the cherry's maturation right down, giving the plant far longer to load sugars and acids into the seed than it would lower down the mountain. The cultivar stays the same, the clock changes, and the output reaches the absolute ceiling of what the genetics can express, without starting to influence the cup with higher technical intervention forms of processing. Elzer started growing coffee in 2015 with a hundred trial plants, expanding to around 7000 trees across nearly two hectares once he saw how well they took to the site. He works the farm with hand tools, hoes and pruning shears, and uses organic fertilisers to keep the soil in shape. Shade comes from pajuro (Erythrina edulis), a nitrogen-fixing Andean legume that's traditionally cultivated for its edible protein-rich beans as well as its canopy, which protects the coffee plants and helps create better growing conditions. Harvest is done by hand, with the wider village turning out to help, a long-standing pattern of reciprocal labour across the rural Andes.

Origin

Peru La Unión, Sallique, Jaén, Cajamarca

Process

washed

Varietal

Caturra

Altitude

2450 m