Gourmet coffee review: Peru Grade 1 Yanesha

We’re about halfway through this month’s Kopi delivery, the review has been a long time in the making because we’ve just been enjoying it so much.

This month Kopi brought us a Peruvian jungle highland coffee, Grade 1 Yanesha. The Yanesha Indians have a heritage dating back 5000 years, and a grade 1 crop is a thing to savour. According to Kopi, only four containers are sold a year so we knew we were in for something special.

Yanesha coffee is a mild roast grown at an altitude of 1400m+. It’s a tough terrain to grow anything at all. Years of cultivation and land moulding, (rerouting rivers for irrigation and carving terraces on to the slopes), have enabled farmers to grow crops on the Andes. Peru’s haphazard weather doesn’t really help things along either, and since this is an organic coffee, they use a traditional guano fertiliser which must be a pain to get to the coffee grounds.

There are multiple Peruvian coffees that use the Yanesha name, but the specialist batch is produced by the real deal. The Yanesha Coffee Project is only three years old and they’re striving to create jobs, combat environmental degradation and preserve the Yanesha heritage. Noble ideals indeed – almost good as their coffee.

The coffee is an excellent morning pick-me-up, it has a soft velvety texture but an acerbic bite which is great for firing up the old pre-frontal.

The dry grounds have an oaky smell with a hint of ginger. When brewed this changes to a Brazil nut type taste that has a citrusy aftertaste. The literature Kopi provided states that Yanesha Coffee has ‘a gorgeous range of aromas that reflects its jungle heritage’, although this is rather difficult for us to picture in a well air-conditioned office that has Talking Heads playing in the background.

To say that it has been making our mornings is not nearly praise enough for this delicious coffee, our thanks to Kopi and the Yanesha Coffee Project.