Ecuador – Pablo Ponce – Sidra – Microlot -Archived

Taste: The aroma of this coffee, both before grinding and after brewing, is almost (almost!) better than the taste.  It’s fragrance is a bit like butter toffee candy and dried fruit.  The taste profile is complex and distinct exhibiting floral sweetness, chocolate, and a big, opulent mouthfeel.  The taste matches its high cupping score.

Roast: Medium – stop just before second crack.  You’ll capture the complexity of this bean if you don’t go too dark.

About: Pablo Ponce owns the 5-hectare farm Perla Chiquita, where 1 hectare is planted with about 2,300 Bourbon trees. Coffees at Perla Chiquita are picked ripe and dry fermented for 12–14 hours before being washed four or five times. They’re then given a pre-dry on cement patios before being moved to raised beds. Drying can take between 10–14 days, depending on the climate conditions.

History of Equador Coffee:

Coffee came to Ecuador in the middle of the 19th century, planted in the low-altitude region of Manabi, which ranges from 500–700 meters. The region is still the largest area for Arabica production, producing about 50 percent of the country’s Arabica yield, though better-quality Arabica can be found elsewhere, at higher elevation.

Coffee didn’t become a major commercial venture in Ecuador until the late 1920s, when the cacao industry was threatened by disease—even then, coffee has largely remained an afterthought to the national economy, and production dropped greatly during the price crises of the 1990s and in the early 2000s. Ecuador’s economy is largely reliant on petroleum, and less so on agriculture than many other coffee-growing countries.

The country’s elevation ranges from sea level all the way to above 2,000 meters—a wide-ranging difference of terrain and climate that, combined with the specific challenges equated with its location on the Equator, provide a unique—but not impossible to overcome—challenges. Selective harvesting is especially difficult: Due to the country’s location on the Equator, the coffee needs to be harvested throughout the year. A branch will often contain all stages of the coffee’s developmental cycle in one: green coffee, ripe coffee, and blossoms side by side. This forces a farmer to hold some coffee, while processing and harvesting enough for export, and it also leads to higher labor costs due to the extended picking cycle.

Starting in the first decade of the 2000s, however, the specialty boom happening in neighboring Colombia and even in northern Peru inspired entrepreneurial coffee producers to invest in good Arabica varieties, improved practices—picking ripe and better processing, rather than simply letting the coffee dry on the tree as café en bola, the traditional method—and advanced marketing strategies. Increasingly, single-farm, single-variety, and innovating processing lots are finding their way to forward-thinking mills, exporters, importers, and roasters.

The promise of Sidra:

One of the most interesting developments to happen in Ecuadoran soil is the appearance of a new cultivar, called Sidra. A cross between a Bourbon and a Typica variety (themselves genetically relatively closely related), these coffees can express very unique fruity and floral characteristics. When grown at higher altitudes and processed meticulously, these coffees stand out on the cupping table, and have the potential to bring Ecuador into the spotlight as a specialty-producing country.

*Microlot Coffee Offerings: Farmers are paid quality premiums for any microlot coffee, which reflects the extra planning, effort, labor, and attention to detail required to produce them, as well as rewarding the ultimate job well done.

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