Eudosia Puelles Troyes

FINCA LA CUEVA STORY

Cajamarca, the department at the north of Peru limiting with Ecuador is known for its amazing coffee. Production of coffee has become a staple of the region and with producers striving to always get better qualities. Here, in the province of Jaen, there is a district named San Jose del Alto, where Eudosia Puelles works her farm La Cueva. The name of the farm, which in English means cave, come from a cave near the entry point of the farm of which her parents told her the legend that a huge bear lived inside. Eudosia, lived in the farm when it belonged to her parents and learned about coffee from them. Interesting, she started with coffee after she divorced her then husband. Coffee was her way forward and forging her own destiny, depending on her job. Since then, she hasn’t looked back and at the farm lives with her daughter Lesli, who helps with some of the chores. For Eudosia, coffee is her life and the only crop she has. As per the farm, she hires people to pick the cherries, do the weeding while she focuses on the process, drying and management. Her biggest challenges are to year by year improve the quality of her coffee plus taking care of the environment by planting native trees for shade. She wants to make some adjustments and improvements to the dry mill, to be more efficient and achieve better qualities.

Her coffee process starts with a good picking of ripe cherries or as she puts it “wine color”. The cherries are then pulped the same day and left to ferment for 36 hours in a traditional tiled cover tank. The coffee is then washed to take out defects and clean it, and afterwards taken to solar dryers where it can stay from 5 to 12 days depending on the climate.