Peruvian 'Finca Belén' {COE #11}

We are so happy to be able to offer this one-of-a-kind, Cup of Excellence award-winning coffee. Get ready to experience a great example of what a Gesha (an heirloom variety from the town of Gesha, in Ethiopia) should taste like: elegant, complex, and subtle. In particular, you’ll experience predominant flavors of violet, passion fruit, and champagne with this coffee.

This coffee comes from the Incahuasi co-op that we’ve purchased multiple coffees from in southern Peru over the years. The producer for ‘Finca Belén’, Feliciano Candía, carefully grows this Gesha variety at 1,970 meters above sea level and boy, oh boy, are the results worth his efforts. To take on growing the Gesha variety in and of itself can come with high risk - this particular variety is a more delicate plant, harder to grow, and typically has a smaller yield, but Feliciano's efforts clearly paid off as he captured number 11 in the Peruvian Cup of Excellence. After weeks of blind tasting, this coffee was selected out of the hundreds of Peruvian coffees submitted to the Cup of Excellence in late 2021. We are very proud to have won this in the auction a few months ago and after much anticipation (and crazy importing fiascos), we can finally share it with all of you. Check out this worthwhile video to see for yourself what impact the Cup of Excellence has in Peru.

The Cup of Excellence was born in 1999 and since then, the global project has expanded to around 15 coffee-producing countries. Designed to help producers receive more recognition and money for their demonstrably better, high-quality coffees, this non-profit rewards farmers by auctioning off the winning coffees scoring 87 points or higher (on a scale of 0-100) with a beginning bidding price of $5.50 per green pound. That’s approximately three times the current market price and it’s common for producers to make far, far more than that for their winning coffees. To learn more about the Cup of Excellence, click here.