Drop Coffees - Vicente Paye, Washed Caturra, Bolivia
Flavour profile: The Christmas coffee has a nutty aroma with flavour notes of Earl Grey tea and roasted cacao and a medium intense acidity of Seville orange and sweetness of mature plums. The coffee is light in weight and has a longlasting finish of cinnamon.
Colour: Purple
Category: Comfortable
Varietal: Caturra
Processing: Fully washed, mechanically and manually dried
Producer: Vicente Paye
Location: Copacabana in the Caranavi region
Process station: Agricafé, run by Daniela, Pedro and Pedro-Pablo Rodriguez
Harvest: July to September 2023
Elevation: 1300-1600 meters above sea level.
This year's Christmas Coffee is a coffee produced in a way, and by people, we are so impressed by. We are immensely proud to have Vicente Paye back at Drop Coffee and thought it deserved to be this special edition.
For Drop, we bought Vicente’s coffee for the first time in 2015, and already then we thought that the flavour profile was a perfect match for the cosy season ahead of us in December-January. It has a comforting Bolivian Caturra taste profile but with exceptional quality. The Paye family is making business from the heart, it is all about working fully organic, preparing the next generation - and exceptional quality.
A Bolivian coffee is traditionally chocolatey and comforting, and we think the cinnamon, plumb and mature flavour gives a clean and crisp, yet comforting coffee, suiting the season.
Vicente’s farm is in the Copacabana in the Caranavi region, and it is a tough growing region. Vincent and his team have continued to deliver incredible coffee despite environmental challenges. Vicente is 57 years old but started in coffee production when he was 20 years old. He worships the land they live on and is throughout every part of the business thinking about his children and the future generation, working with fully organic methods. Vicente says he is proud of how well his harvest is producing and how well he is controlling the coffee from diseases to plagues. The farm follows traditional and organic farming principles, using no chemicals or pesticides. They look after their land in every way they can to ensure their children's generation can continue benefiting from it. For example, the family are always planting new stock.
The Sol De La Mañana program is a quest to educate local producers by providing training and skills necessary to improve the quality of their farms. The program is designed as a school for producers, which takes 7 years to graduate. The producers are guided through every step of coffee farming, starting with the nursery, planting, harvesting, pest prevention, pruning as well and financial management.
A normal visit to Paye's contains playing football, tasting their coffee, looking at the latest methods of growing (and their perfect nursery), and playing with the kids ( who are always very involved. In November this year, we are finally seeing them again after three long years of COVID and having a baby. We hope Vicente's coffee will bring you joy this Holiday season!