for a double shot, aim for 19 g in / 40 g out in 25 seconds with water temperature at 93 °C and adjust from there to meet your taste

This is the darkest roast in our portfolio. It's for everyone who likes a more developed, full bodied and intense espresso with those dark chocolate flavour notes balanced by enough sweetness (think sticky prune jam) to give you a long lasting, lingering aftertaste.

Base Camp Espresso is your happy place: where you make plans for future adventures over a flat white, where you down that boosting espresso for an extra caffeine kick before heading out, where you fire up the camping-stove and brew a simple Bialetti to enjoy with your friends while sharing some good stories.

The beans for this coffee will be changing over the seasons and we're kicking things off with this beautiful coffee from Peru.
If you'd like to know more, read on below.

Origin: Rodriguez de Mendoza, Amazonas Province, Peru

Producer: 250 members of Monte Verde Cooperative

Varietals: Bourbon, Catimor, Catuai, Pache, Typica

Altitude: 1800 masl

Processing: fully washed

Sourced through Sucafina Specialty Coffee

Café Monteverde is a producer group that brings together 250 farmers from the area around Rodriguez de Mendoza in the Amazonas Province in Peru. The founders Alfonso Tejada and Karen Araoz offer their own Finca Timbuyacu as a foundation and model farm for members to learn valuable growing and processing skills to improve their harvest. The pair are committed to improving social conditions for small producers in the region and to market their coffee better.

Each cooperative member harvests and processes their own (selectively handpicked) cherries. These are pulped either with manual or motorized depulpers and fermented in wooden crates or tub tanks for 12-18 hours. The beans are then washed with clean water, removing any mucilage.

Drying varies according to the possibilities on hand: cement patios, roofs, solar tents, or trays. Drying times also vary depending on where it takes place, but all parchment is dried to 12% moisture level. The parchment is then packed into polypropylene bags which are brought to a central dry mill where it is again evaluated for quality. After hulling it is prepared for export.

Peru holds exceptional promise as a producer of high-quality coffees. The country is the largest exporter of organic Arabica coffee globally. With extremely high altitudes and fertile soils, the country’s smallholder farmers also produce some stunning specialty coffees.

Though coffee arrived in Peru in the 1700s, very little coffee was exported until the late
1800s. Until that point, most coffee produced in Peru was consumed locally. When coffee leaf rust hit Indonesia in the late 1800s, a country central to European coffee imports at the time, Europeans began searching elsewhere for their fix. Peru was a perfect option.

Between the late 1800s and the first World War, European interests invested significant
resources into coffee production in Peru. However, with the advent of the two World Wars, England and other European powers became weakened and took a less colonialist perspective. When the British and other European land owners left, their land was purchased by the government and redistributed to locals. The Peruvian government repurchased the 2 million hectares previously granted to England and distributed the lands to thousands of local farmers. Many of these farmers later grew coffee on the lands they received.

Today, Peruvian coffee growers are overwhelmingly small scale. Farmers in Peru usually process their coffee on their own farms. Most coffee is Fully washed. Cherry is usually pulped, fermented and dried in the sun on raised beds or drying sheds. Drying greenhouses and parabolic beds are becoming more common as farmers pivot towards specialty markets.

After drying, coffee will then be sold in parchment to the cooperative. Producers who are not members of a cooperative will usually sell to a middleman.

The remoteness of farms combined with their small size means that producers need either middlemen or cooperatives to help get their coffee to market. Cooperative membership protects farmers greatly from exploitation and can make a huge difference to income from coffee. Nonetheless, currently only around 15-25% of smallholder
farmers have joined a coop group.