Soft and jammy berries dominate the cup, with a base of creamy yoghurt.

Caturra

Maria Ramirez

Maria Ramirez and her family have been working in the coffee industry for many years, mainly as hired labourers for landowners around Huehuetenango. Over this time, they were slowly able to save, eventually purchasing a 0.7 hectare plot around 10 years ago. It was here that they built An’chavin’a, named for a local food plant known as chipilin in English. Nowadays the whole family work on this tiny plot, growing 100% Caturra alongside a few food crops for the family. They have distilled their years of experience working on the farms of others into this project, growing truly delicious coffee on a very small scale and with very minimal specialist equipment.

This lot is one of the finest and most characterful we have tasted from Huehuetenango, and in our opinion this could be for one of several reasons. The farm lies at extremely high altitude, at around 2100 masl, leading to very cool night time temperatures, and therefore slow developing and more complex tasting coffee cherries with high levels of intrinsic sugar. Growing 100% of a high quality varietal like Caturra can also lead to higher quality lots. Finally, Maria and her family have a rather complex and exacting method of processing coffee, based on a washed process like so many in this region. The coffee is first fermented dry for 48 hours after depulping, a rather long period, but in cool and humid conditions like those high in the Huehuetenango mountains, this doesn’t result in over-fermentation. The coffee is then washed thoroughly, removing any of the remaining sticky mucilage layer, before being soaked in clean water for a further 24 hours. This allows for an extra sorting step for floaters, and equalises the moisture content before being taken for drying on traditional patios. Similarly to the double soak processes often used in Kenya, it is also thought that this extra soak softens the cup profile, leading to a full and jammy berry fruit profile, with an interesting creamy yoghurt-like base.