Unfortunately, a straight line is NEVER the path between a coffee producer and Touchy. In fact, you’d be closer to correct if you shrugged and described each A to B as another variation on “ya can’t get there from here.” But lo and behold, thanks to loads of hands and hearts and logisticians (honestly, mostly the last one), coffees DO get here from there. And sometimes — perhaps even often — that gets taken for granted.

To get David Mamani and his family’s coffees HERE, we could not take ANYTHING for granted. It all started in late 2020, with the realization that Agricafe — the preeminent producer and purveyor of superb specialty coffees in Bolivia — was expanding its operations to include more action in the USofA. Always eager to showcase less-familiar coffee-producing regions on our menu, this made for an exciting opportunity. While it’s not as if NOBODY in the US has been stocking Bolivian coffees, the most renowned roasters working with Agricafe have historically been concentrated in Europe, so if the opportunity to be an early adopter on this side of the pond was presenting itself, we wanted to get in line. We reached out, and our first conversation with Agricafe’s Daniela Rodriguez finally happened in January of 2021.

In Bolivia, harvest gets going in the summertime, so it wasn’t for another six months after that initial call that it was time to coordinate samples, and it would be another month before those samples made it to Troy, so that’s August of 2021. Milling and logistics were coordinated after that, and by the end of the year, Agricafe had squared away an importer to bring the coffee to the US, with whom we then coordinated the formal purchase. It was not until this March that those coffees left Bolivia, not until June that they landed in California, and not until July of 2022 that this late 2020 contact finally resulted in coffees from Bolivia making it all the way to Troy, NY. WHAT A RIDE!

And now, having embarked upon certain aspects of that ride two more times, we continue to learn and iterate how we can best represent Bolivia, but above all, our sheer appreciation for access to these coffees has only increased.

As always, David’s coffee this year is an all-day every-way day-making field blend. It has smooth sweetness that reminds us of the fanciest vanilla bean panna cotta, backed up with subtle dried fruitiness and overall immaculate STRUCTURE that feels like a biscotti backbone standing up in your mug, soaking up the good stuff, a full day ahead of you filled with infinite possibilities.