Tupac Amaru

There’s nothing more rewarding than working with a co-op year after year and tasting the way their coffee evolves. Every year, we look forward to the harvest from the Tupac Amaru cooperative in Puno, Peru. This year's crop has a deeply sweet and syrupy cup and is accented with juicy overtones of mandarin orange.

The story of Tupac is the story of Puno’s Sandia Valley, a region celebrated for its distinctiveness from other coffee-growing hubs. These elegant coffees are in turn floral, honeyed, dynamically citric, and full-bodied. The 11 producers that contributed to this year’s lot are of indigenous Aymara descent and reside in the Alto Inambari district. The Aymara tribe spans the Puno region and a large part of Bolivia, associating more with each other than their neighbors in adjacent departments of Peru.

These farmers produce coffee on an average of 2.5 hectares. Once the coffee is harvested, farmers depulp the coffee on their farms using hand-crank depulping machines. They ferment and wash the coffee in concrete tanks, and dry their coffee on raised beds. At that point, the coffee is picked-up and transported for 8 hours by truck to Juliaca, the capital city of Puno, where it is stored until it is time for milling. The coffees of this region are very special to our sourcing partners, with relationships dating back years before the company was founded.