Yacuri

We’re excited to continue our collaboration with Juan Peña, owner of Hacienda La Papaya and CafExporto. Since meeting in Aarhus in 2015, we have purchased many small experimental lots, continuing a conversation through high quality coffee. Over the past few years, Juan has expanded his work, exporting more Hacienda La Papaya coffee to Europe together with us, and starting the CafExporto project, taking over management of two new farms in other parts of Ecuador. We are more than excited to expand our collaboration with Juan, and to share his excellent work with a wider audience. We visited Juan and his team again at the end of 2025, both at the Hacienda and at CafExporto’s base in the nearby city of Cuenca, towards the end of harvest.

Juan’s hard work and innovation is clear when tasting his coffees; top-quality micro-lots, with wildly varying flavour profiles and expressions. Juan mainly works with Typica ‘Mejorado’, the enhanced version of the varietal, first grown on Nestle’s experimental farms in the north of Ecuador. Juan puts much of his success down to the combination of high yield and incredible cup quality that these Mejorado plants provide. Juan has expanded his varietal work in recent years, for example with Geisha seeds sourced from Panama, and honed at Hacienda La Papaya’s genetic bank. Juan distributed a wide range of seeds from the genetic bank to his two new farms, and transplanted his incredible attention to detail in farm management.

During their travels in Ecuador, the CafExporto team have been surprised by the incredible quality of lots they found being sold into the internal market, losing transparency and denying the producer any chance of adding value to their work. The coffees they tasted in the Zamora-Chinchipe region, where they also found the Chito community, were one such revelation. This is a very rural part of the country; with a majority of the population stemming from native Ecuadoreans, one hears a mix of Spanish and native dialects here. We are in the far south of Ecuador; the Chinchipe river forms a stretch of the border between Ecuador and Peru. Many of the farms here are small, so when the opportunity came to manage a larger farm at Yacuri, Juan jumped at the opportunity. The lower altitude and higher humidity from the nearby Amazon leads to a different expression of Juan’s work.

Here, this leads to softer character in this Geisha than the equivalent grown at Hacienda La Papaya. Stone fruit dominates as opposed to citrus, and the typical jasmine florals are softened into lemongrass and lychee.