Ecuador Imbabura Totora 20hr fermentation GrainPro

Coffee Background

Royal’s relationship with Galo Morales Flores and his wife Maria Alexandra Rivera, of Finca Cruz Loma, is still very young relative to the greater pantheon of Royal’s supplier community. However Galo and Maria Alexandra, in addition to personally producing some of the top coffees we buy all year from South America, also expose us to smaller producers in their region with excellent coffee to sell. This coffee is a blend of various small family farms from Ecuador’s northern and Imbabura province, 30 hectares in total, sourced and curated by Galo and Maria Alexandra. The lot is named “Totora” after the large reed traditionally cultivated throughout the Andes famous for its strength and water filtration abilities. Totora’s uses range from crafts of various kinds, to thatching for houses, to entire watercraft; if you’ve ever seen images of the ornate woven rafts used on Lake Titicaca, Totora is the material. Principal harvest months in Imbabura are June to September, but farms often continue picking through December. Ecuador’s namesake position on the Earth’s equator means that medium-altitude coffee enjoys practically a perfect year-round growing season, often with flowering and ripe cherry sharing the same branch most months. For small farms this means a small but long-term labor force to manage the slow, perfectionistic work required for such a drawn-out harvest. In addition to coffee it is common for farms in Imbabura to tend any combination of potatoes, beans, plantains, corn, sugar cane, alfalfa or wheat, passion fruit, and livestock. As everywhere in the coffee world, harvest on small farms typically involves the whole available family as well as hired pickers. Coffee in Imbabura is processed at home on personal equipment and dried on hand-made structures and greenhouses. Cherry is depulped immediately after picking and fermented in sealed tanks (known as “anaerobic” fermentation) for 20-26 hours in tanks. After fermentation, the parchment is thoroughly washed and moved to raised beds under shade canopy for a slow and even drying stage. Galo and Maria Alexandra, the managers and curators of this small-farm blend, manage their own Finca Cruz Loma, a 350-hectare plot in the community of San José de Minas, a small town in the northwestern part of Pichincha, a short trip north of Quito. The estate has been in Galo’s family going back 80 years. Galo’s experience in coffee began 20 years ago working alongside his mother on the farm; he would go on to work professionally in the coffee sector, for exporters and as a project manager, before returning to full-time farming. In Galo’s words, “cultivating my coffee is an activity that allows me to apply and develop the skills and habits I’ve learned over the years; it’s also an essential resource for my family, since my wife, my daughters, and myself are all involved with the production and marketing of our coffee. Everybody in the family has a critical role in the coffee’s success.” Galo’s experience in the value chain has positioned his family well to help create opportunities for other farms by representing their coffees to exporters and directly to Royal Coffee.