Description
Good supply chains deliver tasty coffee. This is certainly the case with coffees arriving courtesy of the Federación Comercializadora de Café Especial de Guatemala (FECCEG), an umbrella organization that helps smaller cooperatives gain access to the international market. This particular lot comes from Cooperativa Agrícola Integral El Renacimiento, which operates in the Quiché Mayan communities located in the municipality of Nahualá within the department of Sololá, which encircles Lake Atitlan.
Cooperativa Renacimiento was founded in 1987 and has 70 members (33 women) with farms that average 1.5 acres in size. The cooperative has focused attention on training producers on the best organic practices to manage their farms and diversification projects like beekeeping. In addition to making their own organic fertilizer and harvesting honey, producers use their own micro-mills to process harvested cherries, which includes hand sorting, depulping, fermenting, washing and drying the coffee to 11 percent moisture. At this stage, FECCEG steps in to support the cooperative with transportation, warehousing and cupping analysis, and later provides the preparation for export.
Tasting Notes: A great cup from light to dark. Clean, sweet edged and balanced. Atitlan coffee seems to fall right between and Antigua and Huehue in taste. The brightness is more floral than winy, similar to a nice Antigua. It’s darker tones seem more similar to a Huehue, coming off on the malty side. Light roasts will have some stronger citric tones but were surprisingly clean and defined. Medium roast were smooth & sweet, medium bodied with much less citric crispness, brings the nice and rich malty tones to the foreground. Darker roasts are a bit less smooth and delicate, provides a cool mix of smoky/roasty/malty without being too overbearing like many Africans or Indonesians can be.
Roasting Notes: We thought it shined best at the light-medium roast level but a very tasty cup from light to dark. Medium chaff & pretty even roasting put this in the easy to roast category. Darkens up a little quickly comparatively to some other Centrals, but pretty spot on for a Guatemalan. A fun coffee to play with different roast levels, or blend different roast levels to change up the tastes.
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