ECUADOR RICARDO VARGAS

Recommended Retail Price: £15.50/250g

Tasting Notes: A vibrant coffee with fresh fruit and floral aromas, opening with blackberry when hot, shifting to tangy nectarine as it cools, caramelized sweetness rounds out the lively acidity, finishing with crisp green grape and citrus.

Region: Pichincha
Altitude: 1,500 m.a.s.l.
Variety: Caturra
Processing: Washed

UK Arrival: December 2025

As customer familiarity with individual farmers grows, it's exciting to be able to release the fresh harvest from the same producers year-on-year. As in wine, becoming familiar with particular coffee producers is part of the fun and appreciation. This is the third year we’re roasting Ricardo Vargas’s washed Caturra. Each year we cup it alongside other Ecuadorian coffees, and each year it’s the best.

Producer

Ricardo Vargas established his farm, Finca Vallejito, eight years ago after leaving a career as a food engineer. His father-in-law was a coffee farmer so Vargas often helped out on his farm during planting and harvest times. Vargas saw the potential to make a profit by focusing on growing high quality coffee for the specialty market and to impact the local community through job creation. Vargas and his wife Miriam Vallejo named their farm Vallejito in memory of her father whose community-minded ethos has been a big influence on them. 

Vargas takes painstaking care to achieve the quality you taste in this coffee. The harvest in Ecuador is from May to August. After picking, the coffee is processed using the washed method. The skin and fruit are removed then the beans are fermented in water to break down the rest of the mucilage (fruit pulp) and develop flavour. Vargas keeps careful records of temperature and sugar content to achieve the right fermentation during processing and then he dries the coffee slowly for three to four weeks, which allows the flavour to develop and ensures the coffee will taste fresh for longer. 

He’s also invested in the infrastructure on the farm, improving drying stations and the wet mill, and looking for the best trees to plant to shade the coffee plants. Finca Vallejito is a 15-hectare farm but only 7 hectares is planted with coffee. In addition to Caturra he also grows Typica Mejorado and he’s been planting Bourbon Sidra. Today, he takes pride in producing coffee recognized worldwide for its quality and continues working to maintain that level of quality while expanding his farm.

Variety

Despite being one of the most economically important varieties in Central America and Colombia, Caturra actually originated in Brazil sometime between 1915 and 1918. The name is derived from the indigenous Guarani word meaning “small” and reflects its compact size. It’s a natural mutation of the Bourbon variety, with just one gene variation causing its compact size. 

Caturra became popular because its size allows more high-density planting and its shape means it produces more fruit per branch than other varieties. For these reasons, Caturra was part of the intensification of coffee cultivation in the last century that we see in Colombia still today. According to World Coffee Research, in Colombia Caturra was thought to represent nearly half of the country’s production until a government-sponsored program beginning in 2008 incentivized renovation of over three billion coffee trees with the leaf-rust-resistant Castillo variety (which has Caturra parentage). 

Caturra was also used in the 1950s to create the Catimor family of cultivars. It was crossed with Timor Hybrid, a natural hybrid of Arabica and Robusta that was discovered in Timor Leste, to create compact, leaf-rust-resistant plants. Widely distributed around the coffee growing world, each country has developed locally adapted selections including Lempira in Honduras and Costa Rica 95 in Costa Rica. Catimors are also grown in Indonesia (for example, our Asman Gayo from earlier this year), China (we’ve roasted one from Banka washing station) and Vietnam. 

Origin

It’s generally hard to find specialty grade Ecuadorian coffee because the annual harvest is relatively small. The country actually imports more coffee than it exports, but Ecuadorians mostly drink instant coffee imported from Vietnam. They also grow a lot more Robusta than Arabica. According to Caravela, the importers who brought us this coffee, a combination of demographic, climate and market trends have drastically reduced the amount of coffee produced in Ecuador over the last decade. “This shift from quantity, however, has yielded a core of quality,” they report.

They also say that the coffee they source from both the mainland and the Galapagos has a negative carbon footprint, thanks to high levels of carbon sequestration due to abundant trees and vegetation. Additionally, many Ecuadorian coffee growers use little to no fertilizer, significantly reducing carbon emissions.