Peru Coffee Overview

Excellent Peruvian coffees can be hard to find. To some degree, the success of Peru coffee has been it’s downfall. Organic certified Peru coffees are ubiquitous, always as close as your local Trader Joe’s, but the coffee is often poorly picked, processed and roasted, if it is even freshly roasted at all. We have been hard at work to establish stable relationships in Peru to gain access to the best coffees. 

Peru is has usually been one of the cheapest origins for traders to source Organic certified coffees.  It’s the “blender” coffee of Organics; it’s $4/Lb. roasted at Trader Joes, and it is threatening to lower prices for organic coffee farmers globally. The Peruvian coffee industry took note of the premium prices paid for Organic coffee, and realized they could produce Organic for less cost, focusing on quantity, not quality. They wanted to be to organic coffee what Vietnam is to robusta. 

There are stories of forests being clear-cut for organic coffee farming (it takes 3 years for an existing farm to become certified organic… not so with a “new” farm). I doubt the image of cutting down forests to grow organic product is the image consumers have in mind … then again, it’s organic and it’s $4 per lb. roasted. Well, you get what you pay for.

Historical Bias?

Peruvian offerings are hardly mentioned in William Ukers’ 1936 edition of All About Coffee and have not been well thought of due to an indelicate, blunted acidity that doesn’t have the refinement of Centrals. I think a lot of this is historical bias because Peru can produce some very fine coffees. In general, these coffees have Central American brightness but in a South American coffee flavor package overall. The good organic lots do have more of a “rustic” coffee character, but mostly because of poor processing practices. Coffees with flavors like this might be pleasant enough, but sweetness and fruited notes can be unstable and might fade a few months after arrival in the US. We avoid these coffees.