June’s White Label is a washed coffee from a farm operated by a young female producer in the Bolivian province practically synonymous with the country’s specialty coffee output, Caranavi.   And while it offers a refreshingly clean, complex, and classic flavor profile, we find this coffee to be a rare treat for several additional reasons.

Bolivia is the only landlocked coffee growing country in South America and it produces the smallest amount of coffee on the continent.  Although the terrain is ideally suited for coffee production in the country’s western Yungas region where the mountains connect the humid Amazon basin with the dry Andean plateau, sourcing coffee from Bolivia presents many challenges. The small farms in the remote coffee growing villages often lack processing equipment of their own, and the dense and rugged terrain makes transportation to washing stations difficult and inefficient.  Being landlocked, the processed coffee then faces long overland travel on often poorly maintained infrastructure to ports in Chile before hitting the water for export. So, finding and sourcing quality Bolivian microlots can be quite a difficult and time-consuming task, contributing to their scarcity.

Even rarer, though, is the story of this lot’s producer, Yulissa Chambi.  Coffee farms throughout the world face demographic challenges like those faced by farmers in the U.S. as younger generations leave rural areas for urban opportunities and the average age of the farmer becomes unsustainably high. Still in her early 20’s, Yulissa has bucked that trend by immersing herself in specialty coffee, excelling as a barista, cupper, and Q grader, winning the national AeroPress Challenge, and taking the specialty coffee world by storm as a grower.  At age 21 (!) Yulissa transformed a neglected plot of family land into coffee cultivation and within a few years produced coffee so exceptional that they have become among the most sought-after microlots today.

Although Yulissa has quickly gained renown for her sparing use of anaerobic fermentation for subtle enhancement of her coffee’s inherent flavors, our lot of San Lorenzo is a classic low intervention fully washed coffee that brings impressive clarity to the cup.  Sweet caramel cream is unmistakable up front, with a silkiness to the mouthfeel and a pleasantly subtle malic acidity evoking candy-apple. Sitting with the cup a minute reveals a supporting cast of a secondary flavors, like aromatic bark, fig jam, and even a touch of pepper soda.

Take this opportunity to see why Yulissa continues to take the coffee world by storm and why we are thrilled to bring you one of her coffees to enjoy whenever we can. 

Region: San Lorenzo, Caranavi province

Farmer: Yulissa Chambi 

Altitude: 5100 feet 

Process: fully washed, sun dried on raised screen beds