Lima is a city by the sea. It sits at about 1,500 meters on a bluff, and in the winter is thick with fog and the smell of salt water.
But Limaโs coffee comes from someplace elseโ1,000 kilometers north in the mountains surrounding Jaรฉn, or to the east near Cusco, at up to 2,000 meters above sea level. Specialty coffee production is only in its infancy in the country more famous for its ruins than itself, but Lima, a new capital with one of the worldโs fastest-developing culinary cultures, is providing the producers here a market.
Today, there are more cafes and roasteries offering high-quality coffee in the city than ever, and this guide should serve as a first stab at getting you to them.
Cafe Verdรฉ
In 1997, K.C. OโKeefe came to Peru as a volunteer for a small school in the eastern town of Moyobamba. From the Pacific Northwest United States, O’Keefe’s childhood was spent hiking the trails around Portland and Seattleโso it was natural he’d spend his weekends off from work on the foot-trails of eastern Peru. Up in the mountains, he found coffee. It didnโt take long to make friends with members of a local village who thought their quality of coffee was higher than in the neighboring region, and it was then that OโKeefe began a career as an exporter, running a company called Jungle Tech.
Now he owns Cafe Verdรฉ, a roastery and cafe since 2007 that sources half its coffee from a farm OโKeefe owns near Moyabamba. Since entering the coffee industry, heโs spent time working as a consultant for Boot Coffee and Intelligentsia, and led the opening of the latterโs production facility in Los Angeles.
โWhen we opened our shop there was one Starbucks in town, eight blocks away,โ OโKeefe says. โToday, there are 76 in Peru. Itโs been a massive transformation, and weโre a small part of that.โ
Cafe Verdรฉ has always roasted its own beans, beginning on a sample roaster before moving up to a โFrankensteinโ of a three-kilo machine today. They supply the cafe and sell to a few other shops in Lima, as well as Pan de la Chola, one of the best bakeries in town. The Cafe Verdรฉ espresso is comprised of natural coffee from OโKeefeโs farm as well as washed from the northern Amazonas region, and comes out sweet and surprising from a Synesso. Itโs one of the most memorable cups Iโve tasted, in Peru or anywhere.
True Caffรจ
True Caffรจ opened in 2015 after the cafeโs owner, Gianni Zanesco, saw that the rest of the specialty shops in Lima were serving lightly roasted arabica. Half Italian, half Peruvian, Zanescoย set out to transport some of Italyโs coffee culture to his home city. He started roasting a darker blend of Peruvian arabica and robusta from India and serving it from behind a long bar. It only followed that he became Peruโs La Marzocco distributor, and wound up with a customized Strada. The Peruvian beans in True Caffรจ’s blend come from producers inย Cajamarca, San Ignacio, and Villa Rica, while the Indian beans come from Sethuraman Estate. If your cup of tea is a strong, milk-based espresso drink, this is the place to find it.
Cate Tasting Room
Open a year and a half, Cate Tasting Room roasts its own coffee under the Bitรกcora imprint, sourcing from producers in Cusco and Cajamarca. Although Miraflores is known for drawing tourists, the multiple office buildings in the surrounding area mean this unassuming cafe caters to a large population of locals as well. Now, their coffee is roasted in Cusco and shipped on a regular basis, but the plan is to move the roasting operation to Lima within the next few months. The food program here is remarkableโwith a full-sized oven cranking out homemade pastries as well as breakfast and lunch, it seems like thereโs something new and delicious going in on the half-hour like clockwork.
Colonia and Co.
Soft open for two months, Colonia and Co. was previously a food-forward restaurant. โNow,โ explains owner Jacqueline Becker, โwe’re focused on the coffee.โ As Peruโs Slayer distributor, she was the first to bring the companyโs V3 to South America. But while her gear is top notch, she says the biggest challenge to opening a cafe in Lima was finding quality coffee to her taste here. โAt first I was bringing in Heart and Slate, going to the States every three or six months and coming home with my suitcases full,โ she says. Now, her head roaster works out of his garage, and they have plans to open a full roasting operation in the near future.
Although Colonia only opened a couple of months ago, it’s already receiving lots of attention. โLots of tourists and lots of Australians looking for a flat white,โ Becker says. โWe have people walking by and looking through the door who see the Slayer and come in,โ which, admittedly, is how I stumbled on the space. Like a moth to a flame serving really, really great espresso.
Puku Puku
Letโs start with the basics: Puku Pukuโs namesake is a bird native to Peru that calls the Andes mountain range home. Like a rooster, it sings when the sun comes up, and can often be found perched atop coffee plants. At Puku Puku, like the bird, the slogan is, โWe wake the world.โ With four current locations and a fifth on the way before the end of the year, as well as a robust network of producers who act as the backbone of Puku Pukuโs roasting operation, itโs not an over-exaggeration to say that Puku Puku, at the very least, wakes Lima. By offering development assistance to their producers, theyโre able to constantly improve quality while also ensuring the farmers they rely on are better able to manage unpredictable weather and bouts of leaf rust, which is endemic in Peru. And at only three-and-a-half years old, theyโre only getting started. Their customer base, equal parts tourists and locals, is still growing, and if Puku Puku has its way, the whole city will not only soon know what quality Peruvian coffee tastes like, but seek it out as well.
Neira Cafรฉ Lab
After two years coming in second, Harryson Neira won Peruโs National Barista Championship in 2013. When I stopped by Neira Cafรฉ Lab, his namesake cafe had been open for 10 days. But Neiraโs not a newcomer to the Lima coffee scene. He started his career in culinary school before beginning work at Cafe Verde. Since then, heโs become the coffee supplier for Central, the worldโs fifth best restaurant.
โWe are partners putting Peruvian coffee on the map as gastronomy in Peru grows as well,โ Neira says of Central. โI had a grandmother who roasted coffee in northern Peru. She has a beautiful farm. Coffee, oranges, bananasโyou could grow on the land what you wanted to eat. She had a bakery and picked and dried and roasted coffee in a pot.โ His grandmother ground her coffee with a batan, a kind of traditional Peruvian mortar and pestle, and served it to her family around the breakfast table with eggs laid by the household chickens and milk from the cows.
โThis place is built to show what Peruvian coffee can be,โ Neira says. โIn the cups are flavors from Cusco and Cajamarca, in a very simple space. We take coffee very seriously as my grandmother did.โ And while there may be more shops in Neiraโs future, the original lab is where he plans to build out first. โThis place is just one shop, but a center of many ideas that we want to develop.โ
Michael Light (@MichaelPLight) is a features editor at Sprudge Media Network.ย Read moreย Michael Light onย Sprudge.