Alto Beni grower families pose during our regular farm visits for coffee purchases

Nelson with Paulo Sergio de Almeida and his wife from fazenda Santa Terezinha in Sul Minas, Brazil

Juan Carlos Alvarez, General Manager of CoopeAtenas during the Costa Rica COE judges visit of the farms and mill

Jose Cardona and his wife Ninfa from Finca del Encanto showing the classical Colombian hospitality serving "cafe campesino" in the balcony of their farmhouse

Our coffee is grown by selected farmer families, cooperatives, indigenous enterprises, and eco-friendly coffee estates.  Our Bolivian coffee comes from the Yungas region (Caranavi, Apolo and Alto Beni).  Most of these high-altitude, shade-grown coffee beans come from Colonias San Ignacio, Calama and Siete Estrellas. Our Costa Rican coffee comes form the renown Tarrazu region and the West Valley.  Our Brazilian coffees come from Sul Minas, Alto Mogiana in the state of Sao Paulo and from the state of Bahia.

In Bolivia, most of our grower families are organized in cooperatives and indigenous enterprises such as SAN IGNACIO, PROAGRO and NAKHAKI. These cooperatives were started with the objective of improving the coffee quality of its members. They receive technical assistance from several Non Government Organizations (NGOs).  Indigenous enterprises, like Nakhaki & San Ignacio, lever their Cup of Excellence® winnings buy plowing them back into their communities by building mills, collection stations, nurseries and self-managed training & development programs. Our growers in Costa Rica & Brazil are part of small farms and/ or eco-friendly coffee estates.  Our Cup of Excellence®, National Winners and Micro Lots coffees come from individual, award-wining farmers.

Most farmer families have on average five hectares (about 10 acres) of land, with about half of it dedicated to coffee production.  Most labor is done by the family , with  occasional, additional local workers during the busy harvesting season.  The cooperatives normally run a coffee mill ("Beneficio") and the coffee is first wet-processed by the families themselves on their farms, and then fermented and washed by the cooperative, the indigenous enterprise or the coffee estate.

Most of our growers have participated and won awards at the Cup of Excellence® competitions, which are internationally judged. We have growers that have placed in the top ten places, some obtaining scores above 90, earning the prestigious and rare Presidential Award rating --a top world-class rating, indeed!

When working with the cooperatives, indigenous enterprises or coffee estates we sign long term contracts detailing the quality and quantity of the coffee to be purchased.  We normally pay above market prices for quality (usually above Fair Trade guidelines) so the farmers and cooperatives seek us out.  We also provide pre-shipment financing to assist  farmers and cooperatives that cannot access traditional banking channels. We have signed renewable, three-year contracts with several cooperatives & indigenous enterprises granting Invalsa Coffee® exclusive marketing rights for their coffee in the US and Canada.

We are always searching for unique quality coffees from the unbeaten path, "the other road", as the New England poet Robert Frost would say.  Coffee quality is not an accident nor a given happenstance, it is a continuous process of doing the right thing from planting the appropriate varietal for the terroir, pruning, fertilizing, & weeding the coffee plants. In a few words, cultivating, not simply harvesting. But it does not end there. Even more important, the process of picking only the ripe beans, carefully processing (removing the fruit flesh right after the coffee beans have been collected, even if it means working thorough the middle of night with candle lights), and fermenting the beans, only for the right amount of time, to remove the remaining flesh (mucilage), & drying the beans in pergamino (parchment) so that they reach 10-12% humidity, without ever getting them wet by the frequent rainforest rains. And finally cupping and selecting the best beans to be vacuum-packed at origin to maintain their harvest-fresh condition until they reach  the consumer markets.

All those steps take a lot of work and effort (mostly by the farmers) and it is easy (and profitable) to take shortcuts if farmers are not economically compensated for not taking them.  We pay above market prices for our coffee because we want to reward farmers for their efforts and because, if truth be told, at the end of the day is the only way to get the best coffee.  Please enjoy our coffee with the knowledge that the farmer that toiled cultivating it was treated with the respect it deserves and also received fair compensation for her/his added efforts.  There is no secret formula to find the perfect coffee.  It is a continuous process that requires dedication, love of coffee, and economic reward for all those that make it happen.