Since inheriting his father’s farm in 2013, producer Valentin Machacca and his family have spent the past few years increasingly focused on the production of specialty coffee. Their two-hectare farm is located in the Calca province of the Cusco region, a province just south of where a number of other Cusco producers on Passenger’s menu are located, in La Convencíon. Production on the farm is very much a family affair, with Valentin’s wife and children helping him play essential roles in the day-to-day upkeep of the farm, about half of which is reserved for coffee production. More recently, Valentin has charged himself with oversight of post-harvest processing and drying and hopes to continue to experiment with different techniques on both fronts. In the years ahead, Valentin hopes to invest in more farm-level infrastructure, such as solar dryers, to continue to push the bounds of quality and secure healthy premiums for his coffee to better support him and his family.

This is the first year that Passenger has featured coffee from Valentin Machacca. Valentin is one of a growing number of single-producer Reserve Lots that together represent an evolving chapter in the Passenger's Foundational sourcing program in the Cusco region. While our team has bought and presented coffees from Cusco for many years, it was only more recently that Cusco officially joined the Foundational menu alongside our five other year-round offerings from producers in Ethiopia, El Salvador, Colombia, Burundi, and Brazil. For each of these Foundational Partnerships, the goal is the same: to try to add value for the relevant producers as a reliable, ongoing buyer - intentionally prioritizing the purchase of a broad representation (i.e. not just the 'cream of the crop') of the coffees and quality grades that each partner produces.

To that end, Passenger’s green buying team is working with our Peru sourcing partners at Caravela Coffee to carefully evaluate each small delivery of coffee that each member of a small group of Cusco farmers produces throughout the harvest. By tasting each lot individually, we are able to make collaborative decisions regarding which lots to blend for the Passenger Foundational offering, and which lots to feature as special separations - as we are with the present Reserve Lot from Valentin. This is the same purchasing model that informs the development of all of Passenger’s Foundational Partnerships and, given the nascent stage of these relationships in Cusco, we are especially excited to be seeing these single producer lots added to the menu for a second consecutive year.