Guatemalan
Coffee News
Coffees
from the Americas: Guatemala
by www.coffeereview.com
The highlands of Guatemala produce several of the world's
finest and most distinctive coffees. The mountain basin surrounding
the austerely beautiful colonial city Guatemala Antigua produces
the most distinguished of these highland coffees: Guatemala
Antigua, a coffee that combines complex nuance (smoke, spice,
flowers, occasionally chocolate) with acidity ranging from
gently bright to austerely powerful. Fraijanes displays similar
cup characteristics. Other Guatemala coffees, perhaps because
they are more exposed to wet ocean weather than the mountain-protected
Antigua basin, tend to display slightly softer, often less
powerful, but equally complexly nuanced profiles. These softer
Guatemalas include Cobán, admired for its fullish body
and gentle, deep, rounded profile, Huehuetenango from the
Caribbean-facing slopes of the central mountain range, and
San Marcos coffees from the Pacific-facing slopes. Coffees
from the basin surrounding Lake Atitlan in south central Guatemala
typically offer the same complex nuance as Antiguas but are
lighter in body and brighter in flavor.
There
are many excellent Guatemalan estates. To name just a small
selection: in the Antigua Valley San Sebastián, La
Tacita, San Rafael Urias, Pastores, and Las Nubes. In Huehuetenango
Santa Cecilia, Huixoc, and El Coyegual. In the Coban region
Yaxbatz, Los Alpes, and El Recreo. In San Marcos, Dos Marias.
Small-holder
coffees predominate in Huehuetenango and Coban, but transportation
difficulties and wet weather during harvest may compromise
quality. Perhaps the best small-holder Guatemala coffees come
from peasant farmers in the Lake Atitlan basin, who are organized
into cooperatives that run their own mills and turn out meticulously
prepared coffee. These cooperatives are clustered near the
lakeside towns of San Juan La Laguna, San Lucas Toliman, and
Santiago Atitlan. A San Juan La Laguna cooperative markets
its excellent coffee under the poetic name "La Voz que
Clama en el Desierto." The Lake Atitlan cooperatives
that I have visited practice coffee production at the ultimate
end of environmental correctness: organically grown in a dense,
bird-sheltering shade canopy of native trees and plants. The
coffee is processed with passion and precision, although delays
in getting the freshly picked coffee fruit down the mountainside
to the cooperative mills sometimes imparts a slight, giddily
fermented twist to the cup. Atitlan cooperative coffees are
a perfect choice for those in search of both cup quality and
a coffee grown in exquisite harmony with earth and the aspirations
of people on it.
The
highest grade of Guatemala coffee is Strictly Hard Bean (SHB).
The regionally designated coffees (Antigua, Atitlan, Cobán,
etc) are tasted and approved as meeting flavor profile criteria
established for these regions by ANACAFE, the Guatemalan coffee
association. Those coffees that do not meet regional flavor
profile criteria are only allowed to be sold as Strictly Hard
Bean without regional designation.
Generally,
Guatemala has preserved more of the traditional typica and
bourbon varieties of arabica than many other Latin American
growing countries, which may account for the generally superior
complexity of the Guatemala cup. Most Guatemala coffee is
grown in shade, ranging from rigorously managed shade on large
farms to the serendipitous thickets of small growers.
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