Happy Monday, coffee lovers. Welcome back to my table, here in the corner of this cafe.
As I mentioned last week, The Wormhole, here in Chicago, has been featuring Portland’s own Stumptown Coffee Roasters on their pour-over bar for almost a month now. As you can imagine, it’s been a really great month for all of us Chicago-located coffee fiends. As you probably remember, we’ve gotten to try a few of these coffees at the Table already; today and tomorrow, we’ll get to try a couple more!
Ready to turn your focus to another of Stumptown’s offerings? Feel free to pull up a chair.
The last offering from Stumptown we had came from the APCEJOR cooperative in Colombia. Today, we travel southwest, down into the ridges of the Andes Mountains, to the tiny village of Puno, Peru.
Again, just as we saw with the El Jordan, this coffee doesn’t hail from one specific farm; rather, it represents the cumulative efforts of a dozen smallholder farms around San Pedro de Putina Punco, located on the Eastern slopes of the Andes in southern Peru. These producers are part of a larger coalition of farmers called the Central Agricultural Cooperative of the Valleys of Sandia (or, CECOVASA). CECOVASA was founded in 1970 by five cooperatives to export their coffees, obtain better prices, and install cost sharing; nowadays, the group now boasts a membership of eight cooperatives, representing almost 4581 producers! Their current roster of cooperatives includes San Ignacio, Charuyo, Inambari, Tupac Amaru, San Jorge, San Isidro, Valle Grande, and Union Azata.
CECOVASA has made a many marked improvement on the coffees they offer over the years, and it all starts at the farm level. Since their inception, CECOVASA has received Fair Trade certification, Rainforest Alliance certification, and USDA Organic certification. This producer run co-op has committed to ongoing farm training which promotes natural agricultural practices and to developing cupping labs at the local co-ops in order to monitor the coffee quality during each step of the process.
the basics:
Origin: San Pedro de Putina Punco, Puno, Peru
Farm: Central Agricultural Cooperative of the Valleys of Sandia
Elevation: 1200-2000 meters above sea level
Cultivars: Typica
Process: washed, patio dried
Certifications: Direct Trade, USDA Organic, Rainforest Alliance
the coffee:
Stumptown’s Peru Cecovasa begins with a full, smooth, and relaxing cinnamon or nutmeg mixed with bread aroma. Like a freshly-baked loaf of cinnamon bread, coming out of the oven. In this case, though, the analogy would only be perfect with that freshly-baked cinnamon bread also had nuts baked into it, because this coffee also has traces of roasted almonds infused with the fumes.
Refer to aroma notes, copy and paste into flavor notes.
Immediately post brew, while the coffee is still piping hot, the flavor is nearly identical to the aroma. I’m getting some strong tastes of cinnamon coffee cake, German bundt cake, and shortbread. It has cinnamon spice, bitter cocoa, and creamy buttery and vanilla sweetness. As the cup cools, the flavor wildly shifts from this bready and nutty to fruity and winy – it becomes, almost, a totally different coffee. I’m struck by the tart green grape sweetness that’s emerging, and the slightly dry white wine flavor. Pushing those two flavors forward, to where it hits the roof of the mouth and the back of the tongue, is a quiet swell of peach and apricot – crisp, sweet, and just a bit juicy.
Medium body; low acidity; piquant, slightly drying finish.
the bottom line:
One of the reasons I love coffee is because it never ceases to surprise me. Take this Peru Cecovasa, from Stumptown Coffee Roasters, for example: Peru is one of my favorite regions for coffee because I generally really love the profiles from there – they’re usually pretty comparable with Indo/Pacific coffees (spicy, nutty, chocolate, earthy); this one, though, was unlike any Peru I’ve ever had. The Cecovasa was cinnamon spicy, and nutty, and it did have a bittersweet cocoa pwoder element to it, but it was also rather, I don’t know – bready. That white wine flavor that emerged at the end was even more surprising.
I liked this coffee. I wasn’t crazy about it, but I liked it well enough to recommend. I think this would make a great dessert coffee, and, believe it or not, I bet it would be really great over ice.
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Andrew is a husband, father, dog lover, craft beverage enthusiast, content creator, and niche market Internet celebrity. Formerly of A Table in the Corner of the Cafe and The Pulitzer Project and contributor to Barista Magazine and Mental Floss, he’s been writing on the Internet for years.