We are starting to work more with small producers in the Cariamanga and Espindola areas of Ecuador, near the border with Peru. This is a lot from small producers in the Quilanga area, which is adjacent to the better known town of Vilcabamba. The area has fantastic coffee potential, but the prices for coffee have been so low historically that many small producers have simply given up on coffee. For those who continue, producing a rough form of natural dry-process coffee they call "bolla" locally has been an option. Unripe and ripe coffee are picked together, and the market price the bolla fetches barely makes harvesting worth the effort. But working with a local cooperative, ProcafeQ, we now have the opportunity to identify special microlots and buy carefully produced wet-process lots, or to build a blend from lots too small to export (as we do in Colombia and other places). This has opened up new possibilities for us, and this offering is from our first arrivals of this new Ecuador program. The Quilanga lots were from producers too small to export, some less than a single bag of coffee, so we combined the best to form the Quilanga-area blend. Yes, it is "Especial." Like the other coffees in the area, the plants are old Typica and you can see this in the elongated bean form of the green coffee.