Bolivia: La Avanzada

Tasting notes

In the roaster’s words

Bolivia: Jeivert Panuni, Honey Raspberry , blackberry and redcurrant layer up in the cup like a summer berry medley, bright and juicy from the first sip, before shifting to a sweet cooked apple finish. The remote region of Irupana sits in the South Yungas province towards the most westerly edge of Bolivia, nestled among the Andes at the edge of the country. It's to the south of Caranavi, the largest coffee-growing region in Bolivia, and shares a similar verdant – albeit slightly drier – high-altitude terrain that makes it excellent for growing coffee. Farms here are small (around 5 hectares on average) and the area has a strong, proud tradition of coffee farming. It's also a place with deep historical roots: Irupana was home to Pedro Domingo Murillo, a late 18th-century revolutionary who led the 1809 uprising against Spanish rule in La Paz, before being defeated by royalist forces at the Battle of Irupana and executed in 1810. He's remembered today as one of Bolivia's great independence martyrs. We've only sourced coffee from Irupana a handful of times previously. Coffee from more remote parts of Bolivia is often made up of contributions from multiple smallholders, which means we can't always trace it back to individual farms. Thanks to improved traceability and deeper collaboration with the Sol de la Mañana programme, we're now seeing more single-producer lots like this one from Jeivert – and Roland was particularly excited about that development for the 2025 harvest. We actually bought a coffee from Jeivert back in 2016, but didn't see more coffee from him. This year, our friends at Agricafe (who run the mill and export the coffee for us) put some of his coffees on a blind cupping table and they really jumped out for all of us! The town of Irupana is at about 1,800 metres above sea level and has a drier microclimate than Caranavi. The coffee farms around the town are on the hills which surround it and reach up to 2, 000 metres above sea level - it's a very traditional coffee growing area, full of very small producers who sell their coffee as cherry in the town to traders. The varietals grown in the area are traditional ones - Caturra, Catuai and Typica. Jeivert is a 2nd generation coffee producer and was part of the Irupana Cooperativo. This large coffee co-operative bought and processed nearly all the coffee in Irupana in 2016 - this was how we came to get his coffee back then! In 2017, Jeivert had been learning a lot at the Cooperative but was convince

Notes

Single-producer lot sourced through Agricafe and the Sol de la Mañana programme.