Ecuador – Fair Trade Organic – PROCAFEQ – Green Unroasted

About: Low production and incentives for growers are among the challenges to sourcing and buying fine coffees from Ecuador: The logistics involved in filling a container can be challenging, but with time and investment in the relationships we’ve begun there, we are confident that there will be more and more cups hitting the upper scores on our sensory table in coming years.

PROCAFEQ is a Fair-Trade Organic certified cooperative, founded in 2001. Today, it represents 200 producers in the Loja region of Ecuador, from the villages of Quilanga, Espindola, Gonzanama, and Calvas. This area is near a large biosphere reserve as well as the national park, Podocarpus. It’s an area of lush biodiversity and a great climate for producing coffee. Coffee from this cooperative is harvested fully ripe, depulped on the same day and fermented dry for a period of 12-24 hours, depending on the ambient weather conditions. Once fermentation is complete, the coffee is washed an average of 5 times and moved to dry on either patios or raised beds for an average period of 12 days.