[141] Peru - Yulisa Carhuallocllo Arévalo's Gesha [Best of Cajamarca 1st Place] [CROP 25/26 ARCHIVE]

We had the pleasure of meeting up with Simon Brown (of Chacra/Las Etiopes) right at the start of January, and we cupped samples together. This lot absolutely knocked our socks off and was an instant buy.

Yulisa Carhuallocllo Árevalo grew up inside the work of coffee in the caserío of El Corazón, Chirinos, learning each stage of the process at home. Her father, Efrain Carhuallocllo Salvador, has had multiple top 10 Peru Cup of Excellence placements in the last decade; and Yulisa has carried on that tradition with a 7th place win in the 2025 COE. This lot comes from another stonker of a win for her - #1st place in the Expocafé "Best of Cajamarca" competition with her lot fetching a record price for the auction.

Brew Guide:

Best Brewed with: Filter

Lightest Roaster Influence: We're pushing this one super hard - hot fast roast, super short development, floral-maxxing. On the cusp of ultra-light - you can brew at 4 weeks but it'll keep getting better through to 8+

Best Rested: 4+ weeks

Filter: 62g/L & 96°C, with rest we like to move down to 92°C

Espresso: Turbo shots + 3 weeks rest. 18g/48g+ & 18s

We’re tasting: An actual bouquet of flowers in the aromatics - we're finding honeysuckle, lilac, jasmine and peach blossom, alongside ripe guava & mango. In the cup those aromatics carry though, with soursop juice, fig leaf, lemongrass and osmanthus tea providing a deep complexity. As it cools, we're finding milky earl grey notes, with a honeyed sweetness and long finish. Stunning.

Traceability

The Story:

Peru has had a reputation for decades. Solid, affordably priced, chocolatey and red-fruit, a lot of certified organic production, the kind of coffee you'd see in a local health food shop or filling out the organic blend at a regional roastery.

Reliable but unexceptional blender material, mostly. There have always been people pushing back on that read though. We want to shout out some particular early influences on changing our thinking about this origin in years gone by James Bailey (Workshop), Sam Langdon (Sucafina), and Andrea Otte (Ally) have shaped a lot of how we think about Peru, both on the quality side and on the impact side, so when we launched Scenery we've gone into each Peru season with open minds and eager to find some bangers.

We've been equally proselytising amongst the team (and frankly, anyone who would listen) for a few seasons now to get more excited about Peru with every harvest - shaking out every last bit of the old reputation and firmly planting in the new. This harvest in particular we think is one for the history books - banger after banger - that we think in retrospect the 25/26 crop might be talked about in the same hushed breath as we do Kenyas & Ethiopia of the mid 2010s - legendary, amongst those who were there to experience it. A big call to make now whilst still in the middle of the season but it's shaping up that way, and there's every chance that we see future seasons exceed this bar.

We've been quietly whispering "Peru is the new Panama" for a while, in the sense of quality (not in the sense of overcapitalised rockstar farms). Gesha tends to produce exceptionally good qualities in the high altitudes found in Peru, and with many of them being fresher plantings from known verified seed stock, there's been less time for the cross-pollination & seed sharing that's created so many off-shoot hybrid "Geshas" (Gesha x who knows?!) rampant in Colombia. We should perhaps divert for a moment to contextualise the Gesha cultivar - originally isolated from a colonial botanical expedition to the highlands of southwestern Ethiopia, from a landrace population in the Gori Gesha forest. It was routed through Tanzania before reaching Central America in the 1950s, becoming catelogued as the T2722 accession held at CATIE research institute in Costa Rica. From CATIE it moved into Panama in the 1960s, and was distributed due to being resilient to leaf rust (roya)- but completely fell out of favour due to being fickle, fragile, low yielding, an absolute diva - useless for growing commercial scale coffee where yield is king! Hacienda La Esmeralda's work in the early 2000s including a game changing COE result catalysed global interest in the cultivar and completely flipped the reputation of Panamanian coffee, and that T2722 accession has know spread throughout the world. The prime Gesha regions of Panama are Boquete and Volcán, sitting at 1500 to 1800 MASL on mineral-rich volcanic substrate from the Volcán Barú, a pronounced Pacific dry season, and decades of focused investment in the cultivar at estate scale. Chirinos sits at an average of 1875 MASL+, on the eastern Andean cordillera rather than volcanic substrate, with young mineral-rich mountain soils weathered from old sedimentary and metamorphic rock rather than from volcanic ash, the latitude further south at around 5°S, and the moisture profile much wetter and more persistently cloud-forested as the Andes drop into the Amazon basin.

Different mechanism, but the inputs that matter for quality and especially for a fussy variety like Gesha (altitude, latitude, slow cherry maturation, persistent cloud cover, mature forest providence) are all there. Where Peru has Panama firmly beat is the range of viable altitudes - it is possible to grow coffee up to 2400 MASL+ in certain regions of Peru, as we'll explore in 2 more releases. 

So what's been behind the slowly building - but by now, almost feeling inevitable & unstoppable - groundswell of quality, momentum and hype for Peru? After getting hit savagely by the 2012-13 leaf-rust outbreak, with up to half the national crop affected at peak. A state-led renovation programme that followed put roughly eighty thousand hectares of new Catimor in the ground, prioritising rust resistance and yield over cup quality, and producers and co-ops focused on the speciality value proposition started down a different path - replanting new and more prized varieties at altitude.

Multi-year donor and industry-funded training programmes have pushed structured agronomy, processing and Q-grader teaching out into the producing regions at meaningful scale, with TechnoServe, USAID, JDE Peet's, the Starbucks Foundation, Caravela and Producers Direct among the larger actors and dozens of smaller ones working alongside. Cooperative-level investment has run in parallel, with Cenfrocafé, Sol&Café, Norandino and Prosperidad de Chirinos all building cupping labs, demonstration plots and centralised nurseries over the last decade.

The financial pull came from the speciality buyer side, with cup-score-based payment models from boutique exporters alongside the larger players routinely clearing materially above local commercial prices and creating an actual reason for producers to use the training. 

Yulisa's father Efrain Carhuallocllo Salvador bought a small plot in the upper part of Chirinos in 2005 and started planting half a hectare of Caturra at a time, building up to two hectares of production by 2009. He named the farm El Cerro for the native forest around it, and Cenfrocafé has been involved since 2007, providing the training and technical assistance that identified the quality potential and put him in the cooperative's internal competitions year after year. He placed 2nd at the inaugural Cup of Excellence Perú in 2017 with a 90.61 at El Cerro, working from coffee that had been in the ground at most twelve years, with further top-10 placings in 2022 and 2024.

Yulisa grew up inside the work of coffee in the caserío of El Corazón, Chirinos, learning each stage of the process at home. Years of training and a steady commitment to refining quality led her toward speciality production and toward Gesha in particular, and she has carried that on with a 7th place finish at the 2025 Cup of Excellence Perú.