On Rutas del inca

May 2023 Featured Coffee of the Month

By Brian.

When I left Querocoto, Peru, on Father's Day 2018, I promised them I'd return soon. And I was sure of it. Those seven days in the mountainous off-the-grid coffee hills surrounding the Rutas del Inca cooperative were some of the most formative in my two decades in coffee. It's now been five years and five harvests since we hugged goodbye, and I haven't been back.

To understand the deeply seeded connection between Summit Coffee and Rutas is to understand our shared history. When Summit started roasting coffee in 2015, the first coffee we ever sampled and ever purchased was from this small, 200-member organic cooperative in a town of Peru whose name I couldn't pronounce. It was Rutas' first ever harvest released to the United States, and somehow a sample of it had found its way to North Carolina.

In the 9 harvests since, we've grown as they've grown. That first year, we purchased 4 bags (600 pounds) of a pretty good coffee from Rutas; this year, we've sourced 100 bags (a lot of pounds) of a really, really good coffee. Our stories are forever linked, but not just because of the fortuitous timeline that we share. Those seven days in Peru offered all of us a perspective about coffee and community that we'll carry with us as long as time. 

Sometime in 2017, I asked our import partner Monica about visiting Rutas -- I had been to Colombia and Guatemala on pre-organized group trips, but I wanted to visit a coffee cooperative that had deep meaning for Summit. Their company had never visited Rutas, Monica told me, and its location a rough six-hour van ride from the nearest city made the possibility pretty grim. But, I insisted that I was up for it, that I love travel and adventure and the mere idea of it being harder to access made it even more romantic.

The calendars aligned so that the week to go was over Father's Day, and while I hated to be away from my own kids, I convinced my own dad (long retired and similarly an adept adventurer) to join me. We took a horrible flight from Miami into Lima, and then a smaller plane into Jaen, and then that six-hour van ride through the hills that was, as estimated, rough and even included multiple "water crossings" where the outcome was in doubt.

The bumpy (a generous term) ride did offer perspective, though, about the arduous journey our coffee partners in Querocoto have to embark on every year to get their coffee to us in North Carolina. I usually order coffee by picking up a phone, or sending a few emails, and samples show up in our mailbox -- first-world business norms in all of their luxury. But driving through those hills, I must have rhetorically asked a dozen times, "How do they get coffee out of here?"

The beautiful part of this meeting is that the cooperative members, too, had a lack of understanding of the other half of this relationship. They didn't know where their coffee -- their primary source of income, the literal fruit of their daily labors -- ever ended up. So when this van full of Americans rolls into a town about 2 square blocks big, imagine their wonder and confusion and all those other feelings that are too hard to identify.

Here we are, April 2023, bringing in what is now our 9th harvest of coffee from Rutas del Inca. Every spring we look forward to the coffee's arrival, and it brings me back to Querocoto's dirt roads, to the cot bed inside a cinderblock room that my dad and I called home for a week. Sampling it on the cupping table this week brings me back to the twilight tastings we did to candlelight in 2018, sipping coffee samples then sharing beers with the farmers who we didn't know but who we were inextricably connected to. I can fumble my way through Spanish conversation, having gotten mostly Bs in high school and college courses, but in Querocoto they mostly speak an indigenous version of the language that dates back to the Incan Empire. In those seven days, we found some shared vocabulary but mostly sat side-by-side drinking beers, walked side-by-side through coffee forests.

So when I told them I'd be back, soon, they probably had no idea what I was saying. But still, every harvest makes my trip to Querocoto feel a little longer ago, and I feel some combination of nostalgic and bad for having not been back. Because, you know, life gets in the way and there are kids, and there was a pandemic, and there's a laundry list of excuses that shouldn't really get in the way.

So, as we release this customer-favorite yet again, I will extend my vow to visit Rutas again (soon) for another year. In the meantime, I am so excited to share this year's harvest with even more Summit customers -- when we visited in 2018, we had three cafés and soon we'll have 12. If you're lucky to drink Rutas, know that it's part of a deep appreciation and shared history between Summit and this lovely cooperative deep in the mountains of Northeast Peru.