The story
Nobody is quite sure how bolivia coffee reached Bolivia. The importer Cafe Imports says it was probably brought by enslaved Africans, as in other parts of the Americas, and that the earliest records date from the 18th century, on estates in the Yungas. The Yungas is a band of steep mountains and valleys that falls from the high plateau around La Paz toward the Amazon rainforest.
For a long time coffee was a side crop there. Coca grew easily in the same valleys, and Cafe Imports says that in the early 1900s coca made up 95 percent of Bolivia's farm market. Coffee spread more widely from around 1970, especially in Caranavi and La Asunta. In the 1980s a coca law, Law 1008, made coffee a favoured replacement crop, and cooperatives and associations grew up to handle much of the harvest. Coffee Review's Kenneth Davids notes that US aid programmes backed this shift, helping small farmers organise and gain organic and fair trade certification.
Production has fallen a long way. Cafe Imports says output peaked in the 1990s at around 156,400 bags of 60 kg, then dropped to an average of about 57,420 bags by 2016. It now lists annual exports at around 30,000 bags. Coffee Review puts Bolivia at a fraction of 1 percent of world coffee, all of it Arabica. Reasons given for the slide include the cost of exporting from a landlocked country, mountain roads that are hard to travel, and competition from crops that have paid better.
Most coffee comes from Caranavi and La Asunta in La Paz department, which Cafe Imports calls the country's most productive area. Coffee Review adds Cochabamba department to the east, and says Santa Cruz department, farther east again, and Tarija department, near the border with Argentina, also grow coffee.
The farms are small. Cafe Imports describes around 12,000 farming families on plots of 1 to 8 hectares. Coffee Review says land reform moved land from large estates to mostly indigenous smallholders, who now grow around 85 to 90 percent of the crop. Both sources see a growing specialty scene, with producers testing new varieties and methods and coffee shops opening in Bolivian cities.
How it's processed
A coffee bean is the seed of a small red fruit called a cherry. After picking, the fruit has to come off and the seed has to be dried, and the way that is done shapes the taste.
In Bolivia most of this work happens on the farm. Coffee Review says smallholders usually use the traditional washed method: the skin is stripped off, the sticky fruit layer is left to ferment so it loosens, and the beans are washed clean and then dried.
Newer methods are appearing in small amounts. Coffee Review notes occasional carefully made natural lots, where the whole cherry dries with the seed inside, and honey lots, where the skin comes off but some of the fruit stays on the bean as it dries. Cafe Imports lists washed and natural as Bolivia's processing methods, and says producers it works with are experimenting with different processes and sorting their cherries with care.
Certification has long been part of the picture. Coffee Review says that in 2012 almost all Bolivian coffee was certified organic, most of it from cooperatives. Cafe Imports says the shift toward fair trade and organic markets helped protect earnings as volumes fell.
Cafe Imports gives the harvest as June to October, with coffee typically arriving with buyers from January to April.
What it tastes like
Typica, an old Arabica variety, has long been the main tree in Bolivia, along with a local Typica type called Criollo, according to Coffee Review. Cafe Imports lists Typica and Red Catuaí as the common varieties. Coffee Review says newer varieties have been slow to arrive, though at least one farm grows Geisha.
For the better specialty lots, Coffee Review describes the cup as crisp, rich, deep and balanced. It often points to chocolate, from baking chocolate to cacao nib, along with almond, orange-like citrus, scented flowers such as lily, and an aromatic woody note. Davids suggests the surprising nuance in some lots may come from high, moist growing conditions and small differences in how each farm processes its coffee.
Because so much depends on the individual farm and its processing, the tasting notes on each coffee in the registry are a better guide than any country-wide description.