Every year Mario's top geisha from Guatemala. Exclusively with us. Worldwide. A personal highlight!

Taste:  apricot, white peach, jasmine and super sweet!

Preparation recommendation:  Suitable for all types of preparation. At any time. 

Coffee:  100% Arabica of the Geisha variety. Unwashed (natural) processed and sun-dried in the drying house.

Transparency:  For this coffee, the coffee farmer has 8:50  USD / lb e get to know said . (This corresponds to 6 times the Fairtrade minimum price of 1.55 USD / lb including all premiums.)  


MONTE DE ORO, GUATEMALA
Farmer: Mario Alarcon Meléndez
Plantation: Monte de Oro
Location: 1600 meters above sea level, Acatenango, Guatemala

We first contacted Mario Alarcon Meléndez in autumn 2013 because we were still looking for a producer in Guatemala with whom we wanted to work long-term. Mario and his family are doing a great job. Very innovative and extremely conscientious. In addition, Mario is very open and communicative. We made good contact very quickly. Mario sent me samples of his (then) sold out harvest at the end of 2013. I also received samples of this plantation from Annette from the Squaremile Coffee Roasters in England. Unfortunately, all of these coffees weren't good enough. The harvest was already too old and no longer sparkling. The taste did not meet our requirements. We told Mario about this and agreed to taste samples of the new harvest again.

In spring 2014 the time had come. Mario sent us the new samples more or less directly from the drying table. Different varieties and microlots. Two of these lots were exceptionally good. One of them was the microlot "El Recuerdo" and the other "El Socorro". In 2014 we bought El Recuerdo and this coffee was a hit! Well in 2015 the El Socorro was better. More independent, more complex and, above all, really hard! So we have now bought the micro lot "El Socorro" for this year.

We paid the great price of 5.40 USD per lb (like last year). That's a very fair price for an excellent coffee. According to current fair trade standards, Mario would only have received a third of it. 

Mario tried to transport the goods and helped us a lot. It's not always that easy, but it worked perfectly here. No middlemen were involved. Just one logistics partner.

El Socorro is one of the oldest parts of the Monte de Oro coffee plantation. The plantation has been in the family for 5 generations and is now run by Mario and his family. A few years ago the farm was almost completely destroyed by the La Roya (Leaf Rust) fungus. The family rebuilt everything and continued to invest. Thanks to a new processing plant, both control and quality have increased. The water consumption could be reduced by 95%. The plantation has not yet fully recovered. However, the quality is getting better every year.

For the 2015/2016 harvest, we made an adjustment with Mario in his coffee bean drying process. Mario now dries our coffee on so-called drying beds and in a different period of time. This gives us an even cleaner coffee that also has a longer shelf life. In order to achieve this we have the contact between Mario and Mr. Flavio Borem - a very renowned professor from Brazil. Together they have made great strides. The result can only be bought from us. :-)

Monte de Oro

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Monte de Oro