About the coffee

Francisco Salucio

Up in the mountains surrounding San Antonio Huista lies Finca Las Peñitas, a 0.9 hectare coffee farm tended to by Francisco Salucio and his family. Here in the Huista micro-region, the landscape is dominated by very small scale family farms, and Las Peñitas is no different. Growing and selling coffee provides the main income for the family, like many others in this remote and agriculturally dependent region. Francisco named the farm Las Peñitas due to the Spanish word peña, meaning rock or boulder. The 0.9 hectares that the family have planted with coffee are surrounded by steep rocky slopes, which mark the edge of their small property. It has been Francisco’s goal for some time to own his own coffee farm; to be able to take control over his own future, and be rewarded for his hard work. For this reason he worked several years as an immigrant worker across the border in Mexico, saving in order to purchase his own plot of land for himself and his family. He then sought out the Primavera program in the Huista area, gaining vital knowledge in order to increase and stabilise his income from coffee. Francisco has taken a particular interest in processing as a means of enhancing quality. During the busy harvest time the whole family needs to pitch in to run the farm, so Francisco works together with his wife Izabela and their two daughters. They use a small hand cranked depulper to remove the cherry from the coffee seed, before a fermentation of around 24 hours. The coffee is then thoroughly washed, before a second soaking of around 5 hours. This second soaking is unusual for the region, but Francisco believes it contributes to the clean and elegant flavours in his coffee. Here we find fresh ripe peach, backed up by a concentrated caramel sweetness, before a finish with the elegance of a fine black tea. Francisco’s dedication is clear here, in one of the finest lots we have purchased from Huehuetenango this year.

Huehuetenango

Huehuetenango is located in the north-western highlands of Guatemala, and borders with Mexico. It is home to the highest altitudes in all of Central America, due to the presence of the Sierra de los Cuchumatanes mountain range, which peaks at 3837 masl. This creates lots of high altitude land to grow high-quality coffee, an important crop in an area where agriculture is the largest industry. A dry hot wind also blows in from the Tehuantepec plain in Mexico to the north, which protects crops from frost, allowing coffee to grow even higher up the slopes, often above 2000 masl. These high altitudes also lead to very beautiful scenery, something the area is known for, but also to a remoteness not found elsewhere in Guatemala. 9 different ancient Mayan dialects are still spoken here, and the region is home to some of the best preserved examples of Mayan architecture. The remoteness also makes sourcing coffee a challenge here, the journey to farms often takes days over unforgiving terrain, and would-be coffee buyers require knowledge of the local dialects, or an experienced guide. We have visited our Guatemalan partners at Primavera for the past three years, and have been stunned by the beauty of both the coffees they have been sourcing, and of this captivating region.

About La Cabra

A focus on raw material

If we don’t feel that a coffee suits our style or what we like to present, we simply won’t buy it. Sometimes this leads to issues in green buying; we have to pay very close attention, to a level of green quality that will support this approach, and to how this will develop over the life of a coffee. We are required to focus heavily on the freshness of coffee, both green and roasted, to avoid introducing taints into our cups. We always use clean and fresh water, of an ideal mineral content to present the coffee in its best possible light. Once we have the correct roasting profile, water, and coffee age, the act of brewing is much more simple. A wide variance in brewing parameters can still produce delicious and transparent cups. It is also important to note that this is not always the most consistent approach. The coffee is laid completely bare, so any flaw with the raw material is clearly on show. We could often develop some coffees slightly more, to make them more approachable or easy to work with, but wavering from our philosophy like this would compromise our commitment to complete transparency in coffee.