Producer: Eli Espinoza
Region: Las Pirias, Chirinos, Cajamarca
Variety: Gesha
Process: NaturalAltitude: 1800 - 2000 masl
Harvested: 2024
Cupping notes: Sweet, mandarin, yellow fruits, red berries, orange blossom, honey, floral hints.
This is our first time working with Eli Espinoza, and honestly, it already feels like the beginning of something special.
Eli’s journey into coffee started when he moved to Las Pirias, a remote mountain village in northern Peru, looking for farm work as a teenager. He began by picking cherries for others, slowly saving until he could buy his own land. Now, he tends to a few parcels totaling around 4 hectares, scattered across the hills between 1,800 and 2,000 masl, planted with varieties like Typica, Caturra, Bourbon, and more recently, Geisha.
Back in 2019, Eli took a leap and entered the Cup of Excellence Peru competition for the first time. He didn’t place — but he did get something arguably more valuable: feedback. Real, constructive guidance on how to push his coffee further. That same year, with support from the team at Falcon, Eli installed his first solar dryer and began experimenting with natural processing.
Just one year later, in 2020, Eli came back with a bang — placing 8th in Cup of Excellence with a score of 88.73, making history as the first-ever natural process coffee to crack Peru’s top 10. Not bad for someone who started out picking cherries by the kilo.
Since then, he’s doubled down on what works — processing all his coffee at his home in Las Pirias, hand-picking cherries, managing the drying process with care, and continuing to refine the natural methods that made his coffee stand out.
This Natural Geisha is the latest step in that story, and we’re proud to be part of it.
