Bolivia Cochabamba بوليفيا كوتشابامبا

The Story Behind This Coffee

This specific lot comes from various producers in the community of San José in Cochabamba; a region nestled in the middle of Bolivia within the Caranavi Province. Producers from this region belong to the Quechua ethnicity and originally came from the north of the country, specifically from the Potosí region — a very high-altitude area in Bolivia that depended for many years on mining. When this activity declined around the 1960s, following government-led agricultural reforms, many families from Potosí migrated to agricultural areas in the northern part of the department of Cochabamba. Since then, they have lived by cultivating different kinds of vegetables, and more recently, since around 2018, they began working with coffee, encouraged by a national program that promoted coffee production in regions with suitable climatic conditions. Our exporting partner in Bolivia, Atoq, began working with the producers here in 2022 to assist with milling and to promote the coffee internationally to increase overall income for the producers.

Harvest typically occurs from April – August and is done by hand once the cherries reach peak ripeness. They are delivered to each producer’s wet mill, located onsite, to be submerged in tanks of water, where floaters or underripe cherries are removed.

The cherries remain in water for 12 hours and are then pulped via machine to remove the external fruit. Next, the coffee is fermented in tanks to ferment for 24 – 36 hours to breakdown the mucilage. After fermentation, the coffee is washed in tanks with wooden paddles and dispersed on patios for 24 – 36 hours and finished drying in greenhouses until the ideal moisture content is reached. Not all producers in this region have greenhouses, so they conduct all drying on the patios.