THE STORY BEHIND

Manco Kapak is a colony in the Caranavi area of Yungus. The colony is at around 1550 masl and is surrounded by jungle and small coffee farms. After the land reforms in the 1950s, the Bolivian government encouraged people from the Altiplano and La Paz to move down to the tropical agricultural areas to farm coffee by giving them free parcels of land. Manco Kapak was one of the settlements for people from the Altiplano, and therefore many of the coffee producers there are very small - having between 1 and 3 hectares - and practise more traditional organic farming methods. All of the producers in this area have Caturra, Catuai or Typica, which gives the cup profile lots of acidity and complexity.

Since producers in Manco Kapak produce relatively small amounts, they deliver their coffee to the Buena Vista mill in Caranavi together, where it is processed and dried. This allows all of the producers to reduce their risk as they get paid immediately, and it allows the mill to control the quality of processing to ensure that the producers receive quality premiums later.

This year the producer group decided that they would like to start producing natural processed coffees, since their washed coffee doesn’t always have the same level of complexity and quality as other colonies in the area. This was the perfect way to elevate cup scores and complexity, and get a higher percentage of their production up to microlot quality.

THE FERMENTATION PROCESS

Dry process seems simple: pick the fruit, lay it out in the sun until it turns from red to brown to near-back, and then hull off off the thick, dried outer layer in one step to reveal the green bean. It is a method suited to arid regions, where the sun and heat can dry the seed inside the intact fruit skin.

It's often referred to as "natural coffee" because of its simplicity, and because the fruit remains intact and undisturbed, a bit like drying grapes into raisins. Since it requires minimal investment, the dry process method is a default to create cheap commodity-grade coffee in areas that have the right climate capable of drying the fruit and seed. 

But it’s a fail in humid or wet regions. If the drying isn't progressing fast enough, the fruit degrades, rots or molds. 

Dry-processed coffees can also be wildly inconsistent. If you want a cleanly-fruited, sweet, intense cup, dry process (DP) takes more hand labor than the wet process. Even the most careful pickers will take green unripe or semi-ripe coffee off the branch as they pick red, ripe cherry. If these are not removed in the first days of drying, the green turns to brown that is hard to distinguish from the ripe fruit.