Pepe Jijón, from the Seven Summits to the Intag Valley

On May 20, 2006, at three in the morning, an Ecuadorian reaches the summit of Everest. He climbs in alpine style, with no intermediate camp, without oxygen up to 8,650 metres, with an emergency bottle opened in the final metres because he just can't go on. He comes back down in thirty-six hours, without eating or drinking. It is the seventh and final mountain of his project, he becomes the first Latin American to have solo climbed the highest point on each of the seven continents.

His name is José Ignacio Jijón, everyone calls him Pepe. Twenty years later, he no longer climbs. He produces one of the most sought-after coffees in Latin America, in a country that imports more coffee than it produces.

A motorbike, a wrist, a forest

What stops the mountain is a motorbike accident that leaves his right wrist paralysed. He looks for a place to settle and buys land in the Intag Valley, northwest of Quito, in the province of Imbabura. The original idea has nothing to do with coffee, plant trees and disappear for a while. He calls the place Soledad, solitude.

At that point, he does not drink coffee. It is the local farmers who tell him his land is made for it. He has no agricultural training and it takes him more than ten years to produce something truly solid. He summed it up better than we ever could, he thought Everest would be the hardest thing in his life, and then he started a coffee farm.

The Intag Valley

Intag is a cloud forest valley, humid, incredibly rich in biodiversity, and known for something other than coffee, thirty years of standoff between local communities and the mining industry. In March 2023, the provincial court of Imbabura blocked the Llurimagua copper project based on the rights of nature enshrined in the Ecuadorian Constitution. That is the context in which Pepe is replanting.

Of the property's 120 hectares, coffee covers only four to eight hectares depending on the year. The rest is forest, a good part of it restored after decades of mining and intensive agriculture. The farm is run biodynamically, without any certification being highlighted, and employs, among others, single mothers from the valley.

Typica Mejorado and Sidra, two varieties found nowhere else

The two varieties that built Ecuador's reputation in specialty coffee come from a Nestlé research station in the neighbouring province of Pichincha, where Ethiopian seeds had been imported to create productive hybrids. A field technician, Olger Rogel, spots two plants with a remarkable sensory profile and names them Sidra and Typica Mejorado.

The name is misleading. Typica Mejorado is not an improved Typica, genetic analyses show a cross between Bourbon and an Ethiopian variety. It was simply given that name because of its similarity in the cup. The trees are tall, yields are low, and the plant grows almost only in Ecuador, with a little in Colombia and Costa Rica.

Pepe received his first Typica Mejorado seeds in 2010. The mother plants from that initial lot are still on the finca. He also grows Sidra, Caturra, Castillo and Geisha.

The Wave process, or how not to shock a coffee bean

It’s his signature, and this is where you need to be precise because the term gets used a lot without really being explained.

Wave is not an extreme fermentation. It’s the opposite. Pepe’s idea is that the coffee bean is a living embryo that needs to be guided into dormancy without ever being put through shock. In practice, he makes the temperature fluctuate during fermentation, alternating warm and cold phases in refrigerated tanks. That’s where the name comes from, a wave, not a peak. This alternation avoids thermal stress and sudden drops in pH that damage the bean’s structure.

The rest of the protocol varies depending on the lots, but the framework stays the same. Cherries picked at around 22 Brix, sorted and washed by hand. Whole cherry fermentation for about three days in a temperature-controlled tank. Pulping, then a second mucilage fermentation for 24 to 72 hours in a closed environment, often with a mosto from a previous lot. Washing, then slow drying in a dark room for nearly a month, with regular turning and controlled airflow, until it reaches around 11% moisture.

When it’s done well, the result is the clarity of a washed coffee with the aromatic density of a natural. No fermentation notes overpowering everything else, which has become rare in competition coffees.

What the industry made of it

The turning point came at World of Coffee in Milan in 2021. Two years later, Hong Kong barista Dawn Chan placed fourth at the World Barista Championship with a Typica Mejorado from Finca Soledad. At the end of 2023, he received the Sprudgie Award for Producer of the Year, the top distinction from the sector’s most widely read media outlet.

Today, his lots go to roasters you don’t come across by chance, Sey in New York, Onyx in Arkansas, Coffea Circulor in Sweden, September in Canada. He was also one of the first Ecuadorian producers to work on pricing models where the full value goes back to the farm.

Putushio, the second chapter

More recently, Pepe has also been working in the south of the country, in Loja, with Francisco Vintimilla, the first person to plant coffee in that area. Their shared project is called Fincas del Putushio and brings together two properties, Surya and San Pedro, at 2,200 metres above sea level, in a dry, rugged landscape where cacti grow. That’s where he makes his classic washed coffees, slowly dried. Back home in Intag, they are six to seven hundred metres lower and in a radically different climate.

Why all this is unlikely

You need to put the scale back into perspective. Ecuador produces around 500,000 60 kg bags a year, a figure that has been steadily declining for fifteen years, and imports more than it produces to supply its soluble coffee industry. Dollarization in the early 2000s made labour expensive, around 20 dollars per day per picker. The average coffee producer there is around sixty years old, and young people are leaving.

In that context, a guy with no agricultural background who buys forest land to live closer to nature, plants four hectares and ends up selling his coffee to roasters across four continents, that’s not a normal trajectory. It’s actually pretty much the opposite of what the coffee economy usually rewards.

Our two lots

We took thirty kilos of each, both Wave Fermented Honey, scored at 88 points. It’s a small amount, and that’s normal, at this farm scale, there simply isn’t volume.

The Typica Wave Fermented Honey is the more straightforward of the two. Light honey, prune, a clean lemon note that holds everything together. Silky mouthfeel, long finish. Best brewed as a filter coffee or in a French Press, without trying to push it.

The Sidra Wave Fermented Honey is broader, almost creamy. Blackberry, candied date, a bergamot note that lifts the whole cup. It handles espresso and the automatic machine well, which is quite rare at this level of complexity.

If you only try one, go for the one that matches your brewing method. They’re equally good, they just don’t tell the same story.