Progresso Smallholders ASD

The Natural Anaerobic Slow Dried process is among the most technically demanding in specialty coffee — and its presence in a smallholder system in Zumba, Zamora Chinchipe, says something meaningful about how far this region has come in a short time. Zamora Chinchipe was, for most of its coffee history, a conventional-market province: remote, poorly connected, without the processing infrastructure or market access to realise the potential of its terroir. The Bracamoros Coffee Fair in Zumba began changing that dynamic, and the gradual investment in on-site fermentation and drying equipment — tanks, raised beds, pulping machinery — has allowed producers in the area to take control of post-harvest work that was previously handled off-farm or not at all.
At 1,650 masl in the Progresso community, the growing conditions carry the character that defines upper-elevation Zamora Chinchipe: Amazonian humidity softened by Andean altitude, native forest providing continuous shade and biological complexity in the soil, and the cool Andean nights that allow cherry maturation to build rather than rush its sweetness. The Mayo-Chinchipe river basin, running south from here toward Peru, is one of the more biodiverse riparian systems on the western edge of the Amazon — and that ecological richness shapes fermentation in this landscape in ways distinct from a drier highland hillside.
This Typica Mejorado lot underwent whole-cherry anaerobic fermentation before pulping, followed by extended slow drying. Two lots from the Progresso operation appear in this competition. The ASD Natural is the longer, more intensive process — rose, nectarine, and cherry emerging through weeks of careful management in one of Ecuador's most under-recognised growing zones.