Giggles and Pollo a la Brasa
July 29, 2025. Jaén, Peru.
I’m thinking about family.
The kind you’re born with, and the kind you make.
Last night, I sat at a table full of family. The kind I’ve made.
Angel and Cati, our boots on the ground partners in Peru, along with their 3 children and Miguel Minga Cuña, the producer of much of our larger lot coffee as well as the Tres M microlots.
We had worked all day in the heat of Angel’s second-story lab, perched over the sacks of coffee that will be loaded onto a container and shipped to Oakland for our customers to release quite soon.
We worked all day, and then we worked some more because Miguel came back with some samples and wanted an opinion on whether he should buy them or not. Said samples were roasted and cupped in spite of the hour. Wrung out and exhausted, our eyes are brighter than they've ever been.
Miguel Minga Cuña, between giggles, in Angel's lab this steamy night in August 2025.
A mototaxi brought us white plastic containers of pollo a la brasa, which is basically the best roasted chicken in the entire world. We sat together and dove in, our faces greasy with the salty skin and pale green ají coating our fingers.
My Spanish wasn’t quite up to catching every single joke that flew around the table, and I was tired. I glazed over, looking at the glow on each face and realizing there was no TV, nobody was on their phone, and my chosen family genuinely likes each other.
Miguel’s got this giggle. He giggles a lot. He finds life hilarious. He found it hilarious that I fell on my ass climbing the near-vertical slopes of his farm and he found it hilarious that this relatively-fit woman of forty practically had to crawl back to the car after the forty-minute hike from his farm.
On Miguel's farm. At the very, extreme, almost there, extremely steep, top. August 2025
Peru for me is this entire amalgam of experience and intentionality.
I’ve been learning Spanish on my own since I was a 14-yo homeschooled girl stuck in Clinton, Missouri.
And my very first coffee farm visit was to Peru, to Finca La Encañada in San Martín, where I looked at the coffee pulper and thought, it smells. Angel was there with me, patiently teaching me basic Spanish words during the interminable drives. I vowed to return.
When as the CEO of Catalyst Trade I did come back as an intentional buyer, even bringing my parents with me to build some of the best memories of my lifetime, it felt like coming home.
The most special hike of all time: with my dad to Gocta Falls, May 2022.
Even closing down Catalyst, and leaving coffee for a while, what really bothered me was that I didn't have work to do in Peru. When I began building the strategy to launch Swift Coffee Sourcing, I knew that Peru would be at its center.
At Swift, we are leaning hard into Peru coffee for so many reasons.
It’s obviously the right play at this exact moment because we can replace Brazil coffee for less, right now when everybody’s stressed out of their gourd about tariffs, snow, and rising prices.
Additionally there are so many coffee profiles here, so much to discover. And things actually work here. Shipments bang out the door like eager little sheep, documents flying toward payment and ships quickly moving up the coast.
But I am here because these beautiful people—Angel and Cati, Dionisio Aguilar of La Encañada, and so many more—are a central part of my chosen family.
Yes, coffee is transactional. Yet the transactions are merely a methodology to enable this kind of relationship. Commerce underlaying connection.