This is a beautifully balanced soft berry sweet coffee that brews very well as a filter, but excels as an espresso. We’ve tried it using all sorts of espresso recipe variations on the Sage barista pro, and we’ve found something yummy in all of them. Pull it short to enhance the juicy fruit flavour, or allow it to run a little longer to draw out more delicious cakey sweetness. Through milk this produced some delicious light toffee notes. 

This is actually our first Guatemalan coffee! Our coffees from Honduras have been keeping us busy, but when we tried these, they lit up the tasting table so we had to buy some to share with you. 

This coffee is from a mill which prepares coffee from 140 smallholders in Huehuetenango in the highlands of northern Guatemala. This remote community of coffee growing specialists have lived in these hills since the early Mayan period, as far back as 200AD. 75% of the Huehuetenango department are indigenous Mayan people, the Mam.  They are reputed to be excellent farmers, producing cacao for hundreds of years. 

The porous clay soil is rich in nutrients and drains well, and the altitude and climate provide excellent conditions for producing coffee. The hot winds blowing in from Mexico over the mountains create tropical highland conditions that means that the coffee can be grown at high altitudes of 1800-2000 metres, with the warm winds keeping the frosts off the coffee. 

These conditions also allow the small hold farmers, whose farms are around 1 hectare, to carefully process their own coffee cherry, washing and drying them before taking them to the mill near San Antonio Huista for final preparation to be sold. 

The cool conditions on the farms means that once picked and pulped, the coffees take a full day to ferment and sometimes the night as well, adding to depth of flavour. As the harvest and processing is typically dry, this allows farmers to sun dry the coffees on small drying patios. 

The microclimates of Huehuetenango, combined with the craft of the farmers there produce some of the most sought after coffees from Guatemala, and this co-op lot is a mouth watering example. If you enjoy a soft fruity sweet espresso, then look no further. 

Guatemala San Antonio Huista

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Guatemala San Antonio Huista

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