Peru: La Palestina, SL9 'Inca Gesha' (Organic)

Complex, floral and also super juicy, this cup starts with orange juice and hibiscus, with a little hint of mango as well. It swings into butterscotch on the finish, lasting into a long and lingering aftertaste.

An exceptionally complex coffee with an unusual story! Tucked into the cloud-draped hills of San José del Alto, deep in the Jaén province of Cajamarca, Northern Peru, Finca La Palestina is a farm that rewards a closer look.

The Perfect Setting

The setting is half the story. About 90% of the land at La Palestina is hills, with the remainder lush forests of diverse flora, and the Tabaconas and Cochalán river basins shape the climate. Temperatures sit comfortably between 18 and 24°C, rainfall is near-constant, and the farm's parcels stretch anywhere from 1,200 to 2,000 m.a.s.l. (with an average elevation around 1,769m). High, damp, biodiverse, perfect conditions for growing great coffee.

La Palestina isn't really a single farm, it's an 11-hectare patchwork of seven parcels of land. Each segment is managed by a different family member with their own expertise, all operating under one name. Its story starts in 1976, when Don José Alarcón and Doña Zobeida Coronel relocated to San José del Alto with their four young children in tow, drawn to the area by its reputation for rich soil and ideal growing conditions. The land they bought had previously been cattle pasture so they started small, planting up their coffee trees from scratch, and grew it gradually. As the family grew, so did the size of the farm, with additional land bought up over the years to pass on to the children. By the early 1990s, the next generation had the reins, with sons Juan, José and Anibal each inheriting a piece of the farm and pushing quality higher.

A Family Affair

Today, three generations of Alarcón Coronels share a sprawling residential compound. Processing is centralised at a single wet mill, where José and Anibal oversee fermentation and drying. Each family member brings their own specialism to their parcel, but harvest is a collective effort, with everyone pitching in to pick and process. Coffee is La Palestina's main source of income, supplemented by bananas, yucca, and various fruit trees, and the family has quietly become a cornerstone of the specialty coffee community in San José del Alto. Gradually they have earned a strong reputation in Peru's specialty coffee growing scene, earning a spot in the top 20 producers of the 2019 Peruvian Cup of Excellence.

Care For The Land

What really sets La Palestina apart is the family's relationship with the land itself. They'll tell you that anything they plant here seems to grow with ease, and they've leaned into that observation hard. The original grassland has been gradually transformed into something closer to a coffee forest. Over more than seventy years, the family has persisted in upgrading the land, planting and protecting many native tree species, building a diverse and balanced ecosystem rather than a coffee monoculture. Their dedicated approach to agroforestry is a necessary factor of the farm.

The processing carried out at their wet mill reflects the Alarcón Coronel's same dedication to quality. Cherries are floated to remove defects and unripe coffee, then wet fermented in tanks for 24 to 28 hours, before being depulped, washed and laid out to dry on raised beds for 15 to 25 days. All wastewater and mucilage are placed in ground deposits rather than waterways, and raised pallets are used throughout to keep the parchment off the floor. Water is reused wherever the process allows. None of these factors are showy but they add up to a farm that genuinely takes responsibility for its environmental footprint, and that thinking is embedded in how they have worked for generations.

Happy Trees

For a long time the farm focussed on classic coffee varietals, Bourbon, Caturra, Catuai and Catimor. These are all solid, reliable, and proven performers in Peru. More recently, the family has started pushing into rarer territory. Their first Gesha lot premiered in 2022. Then came SL9, a Kenyan-origin variety that's seriously uncommon in Peru. They've also taken on Bourbon Marshell, a recent Peruvian discovery (named for the farmer in the north of the country on whose land the unusual plants were first found, with seed since multiplied and distributed across the region). And they've started experimenting with honey processing alongside their core washed work.

A lot of this expansion has happened in collaboration with Origin Coffee Lab, who have been helping the family renovate and replant the farm in phases, following best agricultural practices designed to maximise both quality and yield. The pay-off has been remarkable. Coffee trees that usually take three years or more to hit their stride have been productive at La Palestina after just one. Origin Coffee Lab themselves have called the farm's yields "simply astounding", which isn't a common reality for most coffee farms.

A Somewhat Mysterious Varietal

SL9 is a coffee varietal which was mentioned to us by Origin Coffee Lab, our exporters in Peru. Being an SL prefix would mean it came from the Scott Lab program in Kenya, but SL9 isn't a varietal which you see in Kenya. The Scott Lab program carried out selections and breeding in Kenya and has had a lasting and huge influence for its two most famous varietals, SL28 and SL34. These varietals are now found throughout Kenya and are tied closely to the distinctive flavour profiles produced there. However, as the numbers suggest, there were a lot of other varietals which preceded SL28 but which are unknown today.

SL9 wasn't well received in Kenya. It seems to have been considered not very productive and susceptible to Coffee Berry Disease and never got widely adopted. So how did it end up in Peru? We don't know. Genetic testing confirms that the Peruvian "SL9" is part of a group of Ethiopian legacy varietals including SL34 and the Kenyan SL9, so it's possible that they're the same thing. However, there's no evidence of this travel from Kenya to Peru and the development of the varietal there. Indeed, history has interrupted and lost records from many of the programs of distributing seeds. An equally compelling story is that SL9 was a selection from Ethiopian plants held at Scott Lab and may have already represented a stable varietal in Ethiopia, and that SL9 in Peru made its way there direct from Ethiopia, for which there are records of seed deliveries.

We'll almost certainly never know the real route this varietal took and whether SL9 is the right name for it. We're calling it that, because that's what it was called when we bought it, but it's also known colloquially as Inca Gesha and you can read a lot more in-depth on this story in our own guide to the varietal or the very well respected research work by Christopher Feran.

• Ozone Varietal Guide: SL9 'Inca Gesha' →
• The lost origins of "Inca Gesha" by Christopher Feran →

Either way, we picked it out on a cupping table for its great cup profile, floral but also with lots of exotic fruit and juiciness.

• Country: Peru
• Region: Jaén
• Farm: La Palestina
• Size: 11 hectares
• Producer: The Alarcón Coronel Family
• Elevation: 1,790–1,850 m.a.s.l.
• Variety: SL9 / Inca Gesha
• Processing method: Washed

Cupping notes: Hibiscus, orange, butterscotch.

Cup of Excellence Cupping Scores

• Clean cup (1–8): 6.5
• Sweetness (1–8): 6.5
• Acidity (1–8): 6.5
• Mouthfeel (1–8): 7
• Flavour (1–8): 7
• Aftertaste (1–8): 6.5
• Balance (1–8): 7
• Overall (1–8): 8
• Correction (+36): +36
• Total (max. 100): 91

If you'd like to find out more about how we score coffees, make sure to read our blog post "What Do Coffee Cupping Scores Actually Mean?" and if you'd like to try cupping yourself, we've got a guide to that too: What is Coffee Cupping.

Medium dark
Through the gap and let this develop a little in the gap, keeping the roast to the end of the gap, no further.