Tastes Like: papaya, cacscara, buttery, lavender

Producer: Pedro Flores
Department: La Paz
Province: Caranavi
Town: Villa Rosario
Variety: Catuai
Altitude: 1500-1670 MASL
Process: Washed 35 Hour Ferment

This coffee was produced by Pedro Flores in the colonia of Villa Rosario, located 180km from La Paz in the heart of the Caranavi province. Having grown coffee in the region since he was a teenager, few people know Villa Rosario as intimately as Pedro — and the lush, healthy trees he tends to prove this. This region is the epicentre for coffee production in Bolivia, with extremely high altitudes, rich soil and wide daily temperature ranges providing great conditions to produce exceptional coffee.

Pedro’s farm, El Mirador, is 10 hectares in size and is located at 1,500–1,670m above sea level. The farm is planted with Caturra, Catuaí, and Typica varieties, and the harvest runs from June to October, with the peak harvest in June and July. The cherries used for this lot are 100% Catuaí and come from the most elevated part of the farm, where the ripening process is slower, allowing the sugars to develop more evenly to produce a very sweet coffee.

Pedro Flores was born in the Aroma province, in the department of La Paz. When he was six years old, he and his family moved to Caranavi. At the time, there was a crisis in the mining sector, because the commodity price for minerals was very low. To try to boost the economy and support the poorest communities in Altiplano (a town above La Paz), the government gifted parcels of land in Caranavi to many families, including Pedro’s, to encourage them to move out of La Paz and find other ways to build a living.

Pedro inherited his family’s farm when he was just 14 years old, and at 18 he started growing coffee, alongside tomatoes and citrus fruit, on the farm. Like many families in Villa Rosario, Pedro initially relied on selling his coffee at the local market, which meant low prices and little reliability. Over the last decade, Pedro has focused on producing specialty coffee, which results in higher premiums paid for his coffees and allows him to maximise the potential of his land. Today, he selectively picks his coffee cherries and sell his top-grade coffees for substantially higher prices to our partners the Rodríguez family at Agricafe as part of their Sol de la Mañana program. This initiative is aimed at improving infrastructure and farming practices at farms in order to create a more sustainable future for coffee in Bolivia.

Pedro Flores has been part of Agricafe’s Sol de la Mañana program since its establishment in 2014. As part of the initiative, Pedro follows a very structured series of courses focused on improving both quality and, critically, yield quantity at his farm. The curriculum hones in on one aspect of farming at a time and includes information on building and maintaining a coffee nursery, when to prune and use fertiliser, how to avoid and treat leaf rust, and how to selectively pick coffee. Agricafe has also helped Pedro identify which parts of his farm to renovate and repair, with a focus on long term, sustainable, and ultimately profitable farming practices.