Peru Huabal Mario Rafael

In the village of Santa Rosa, high in the Huabal district of Cajamarca, Mario Rafael Chamaya tends 2.5 hectares of Caturra and Bourbon at 1,850 meters. While many of his neighbors switched to high-yield, disease-resistant plants, he kept the old varieties. The cup makes the case for that choice.

OriginPeru RegionSanta Rosa, Huabal, Cajamarca Elevation1,850 meters ProcessDouble-soaked washed VarietiesCaturra, Bourbon The Source

Cajamarca's Quiet Crown

Cajamarca sits in Peru's far north, a region of steep ridges and cloud forest that has become the country's top coffee producer and its leading exporter by value. Peru is the world's ninth-largest producer and the leading exporter of organic coffee, yet much of that volume disappears into anonymous regional lots before anyone tastes a single farm. The gems hide inside those blends, and Huabal is one of the places they come from.

Mario Rafael Chamaya farms a small plot in Santa Rosa, where elevation does much of the quiet work. At 1,850 meters, cool nights slow the cherry's maturation, concentrating sugars and building the kind of structure that high-altitude coffee is known for. His Caturra and Bourbon are heirloom-leaning choices that reward careful picking over sheer yield, which is exactly why so few growers still plant them.

The Craft

Sorted by Float, Soaked Twice

Mario grades his cherry in flotation tanks, letting water separate the dense, ripe fruit from the rest before any processing begins. He then runs a double-soaked washed method, returning the coffee to clean water after the initial wash. This second soak extends the fermentation window and strips away the last of the mucilage, producing a clarity and balance that ordinary washed lots rarely reach. To understand how this differs from natural processing, see our guide to washed and natural coffee processing methods.

We roast this one to City+, stopping short of the point where roast character would flatten the fruit. The goal is a sweet almond and caramel backbone with the cinnamon-cocoa edge intact. It is a roast tuned to let Mario's processing speak rather than cover it.

Sweet Almond Dark Caramel Dried Green Apple Cinnamon Cocoa BodyMedium AcidityBalanced The Cup

Clean, Spiced, and Articulate

As pour over, the cup is clean and articulate, leading with sweet almond and dark caramel and finishing on dried green apple with a whisper of cinnamon cocoa. Pulled as espresso, it shifts toward hazelnut spread with a red-fruit complexity that keeps it from going flat. Brewed as cold brew, it reads like chocolate biscotti dipped in brown sugar syrup, sweet and rounded without losing its edges.

Find Your Fix

For pour over, use a 1:16 ratio at 205F with a three-minute total brew on a Chemex or V60. For espresso, pull 19g in to 40g out in about 30 seconds. For cold brew, run a 1:15 immersion for 16 hours on a coarse grind. Browse the rest of our coffee beans to find your fix.

Roasted in small batches at our Virginia Beach roastery.

Packaged in reusable glass mason jars, returned locally for reuse. Solar-roasted.

Virginia Beach, VA