Nima Juarez - El Roble, Peru

High in the hills above La Coipa, at 1,720 metres above sea level, Nima Juarez runs one of the most quietly remarkable coffee operations we buy from. The farm is small, the terrain is brutal, and there's no electricity. But the coffee – and the thinking behind it – is exceptional.

La Coipa and the Region

La Coipa sits at the crossroads of the Jaén and San Ignacio provinces in the Cajamarca department of northern Peru. It's a prolific growing area – responsible for around 9% of Peru's total coffee production – but the landscape is uncompromising. Steep hillsides, dense cloud forest, near-constant rainfall from October through March, and limited infrastructure even by the standards of Peru's remote coffee-growing regions. The combination of high altitude and cool, misty conditions makes for slow, even cherry maturation, which is exactly what you want for complex, nuanced coffee.

Nima and the Farm

Nima – full name Aleydy Yessenia Nima Juarez – bought her first farm, El Roble, in 2015. She lives at the centre of it with her husband Keny, their two children, and their dog Botas, who earned his name (meaning "boots") through an enthusiastic habit of eating any footwear left unattended. The farm covers around 2.5 hectares of Catuai. She also manages a second plot nearby, La Quebrada, which is planted with Marshell – a variety we'll come to in a moment.

Without electricity or mains water, life on the farm requires genuine self-sufficiency. The family found a natural spring on the land for drinking water, and grow banana and cassava alongside the coffee to feed themselves through the year. By the drying tables, there's a small hive of native stingless bees – not just a source of honey, but active pollinators for the coffee plants. It's the kind of integrated, practical ingenuity that comes from living and working in the same place, solving real problems with what's available.

The new raised drying beds Nima invested in are a significant development. For a producer at this scale, they represent a serious financial commitment. But Nima is clear-eyed about the stakes: she knows that commodity coffee at low prices won't sustain her family's future, and that investing in quality is the only meaningful path forward.

Gallitos de las Rocas

Nima is part of the Gallitos de las Rocas producer group, a collective of smallholders in La Coipa. The group takes its name from the Andean cock-of-the-rock – Peru's national bird, known locally as tunki – one of the most striking birds in the Andean cloud forests, with its vivid scarlet crest and brilliant orange plumage. It's an apt symbol for a group of producers doing something exceptional in difficult conditions.

The group works with exporter Origin Coffee Lab through their Solidario programme – a support model built around training, financing, and direct quality feedback. Producers receive hands-on guidance in farming practices and post-harvest technique, as well as regular cuppings of their own lots so they can understand exactly where their coffee sits and what improvements will move the needle. For smallholders without the scale or infrastructure that larger operations take for granted, this kind of direct feedback loop is transformative.

The Marshell Variety

The most significant development at El Roble in recent years is Nima's adoption of Marshell – a variety with one of the more extraordinary origin stories in modern specialty coffee.

In 1997, a coffee farmer named Grimanés Morales Lizana noticed an unusual plant growing on her farm, La Lucuma, in the San Ignacio province. It looked different from everything else she was growing – different leaf shape, different structure. She didn't think much of it. For fourteen years, it just quietly grew alongside her Bourbon, Catuai, and Catimor. Then, in 2011, a fungal disease called ojo de pollo – caused by Mycena citricolor, capable of devastating an entire farm in the wet, high-altitude conditions of Cajamarca – tore through her plantation. It wiped out everything. Everything except that one odd tree.

Grimanés began propagating exclusively from the survivor. She named it Marshell – using letters from the names of her family members, honouring her father-in-law Marcelino. When she entered it in the 2019 Cup of Excellence Peru, the judges gave it a score of 92.28. It won first place, beating a Geisha into second. She also became the first woman to win Cup of Excellence Peru. The coffee world sat up.

Marshell is believed to be a natural mutation of Bourbon, though its exact genetics remain somewhat unclear. What isn't unclear is its behaviour: it shrugs off coffee leaf rust, ojo de pollo, and other diseases that have historically made high-altitude farming in Cajamarca precarious, while producing cups of remarkable complexity and sweetness. Seeds from Grimanés's original plants have since been distributed across San Ignacio, Jaén, and La Coipa, and Nima is among the producers who've been quick to adopt it. At 1,720 metres, El Roble and La Quebrada are exactly the kind of farms where Marshell thrives.