Ecuador Loja

Ecuador’s Loja province is proof that a country can produce a record-setting cup without producing much coffee at all. At the country’s first Cup of Excellence in 2021, Loja farms swept first, second, and third place, and Abel Salinas Pacheco’s washed Typica Mejorado from Finca Arashi, a 7-hectare farm above Saraguro, sold at auction for $97.10 a pound, a price that beat the previous record set by Ethiopia’s Cup of Excellence earlier that same year. Buyers at the auction specifically noted how rare it was to see a Loja lot reach international bidding at all, according to the Tea & Coffee Trade Journal’s coverage of the sale.

The variety behind that win, Typica Mejorado, carries a slightly misleading name. Producer accounts collected by Perfect Daily Grind trace it to a mid-20th-century Nestle breeding program based in Ecuador’s Pichincha province, where a field technician named Don Olger Rogel is credited with selecting out the two seedlots that became Typica Mejorado and its sibling variety, Sidra, from stock imported mainly from Ethiopia. Despite the name, it is not believed to be genetically true Typica: growers kept the name because the cup reminded them of Typica’s clean profile, just more expressive. From that Pichincha origin, smallholders across Loja, at farms like Arashi in Saraguro and El Alisal in Quilanga, have made it the variety most associated with the province today.

Loja’s farms sit at 1,700 to 2,300 meters, high even by specialty standards, with the main harvest running May through September. Most of the region’s coffee is grown by smallholders without the capital for synthetic inputs, which is part of why Loja produces a disproportionate share of Ecuador’s organic-certified coffee. Washed processing is the traditional method: at Arashi, cherries are depulped and dry-fermented for 24 hours before washing and a 15-day greenhouse drying period, a slower, more controlled version of the same washed-lot logic used across the specialty world.

Two independently published, dated Coffee Review lots show both ends of what Loja can do. The Cup of Excellence-winning Arashi lot cups exceptionally clean and high-toned: pineapple, bergamot, cocoa nib, hazelnut, and ginger flower, with a 96-point score that ranked it among Coffee Review’s top coffees of 2022. A more ordinary Vilcabamba lot from small-holding Loja farmers, reviewed a decade earlier, still cups well at 92 points, with butter, roasted cacao nib, dark cherry, clove, and a tangerine-like top note. The gap between them is real: this is a fragmented, low-volume origin, and a single competition micro-lot from one exceptional farm is not the same coffee as the everyday cup Loja’s other smallholders bring to market.