Guatemalan Coffee - "Love at First Sip"

Full Cupping Notes

This coffee from San Martin Jilotepeque is a simple, delicious "every day" type coffee, bittersweet and balanced in middle-to-dark roasts, with subtle top notes impacting the cup. The aroma at medium dark roast level has a smell of sweet smell of cinnamon-sugar toast, with hints of caramel, and rich dark cocoa. The flavors in the brewed coffee of middle roasts are sturdy, with rounded sweetness, and a nice balance of low tones and acidity. The cup acidity  is quite nice and brings an aspect of black tea to the brew. 

Farm Details

This lot is made up from the coffee of several small holders in and around the town of San Martin Jilotepeque, about 2 hours south of Antigua, in Guatemala's Chimaltenango Municipality. The farmers who are part of this project are banded together around Jose Garcia, a local farmer himself, who's taken the job of organizing and collecting coffee cherry to be sold. Unlike some of the other Guatemala buying projects we are a part of, this one differs in that the coffee is sold by Chepe in whole cherry, not parchment. So instead of each individual lot being processed by the farmer, they are all mixed together each week and delivered to a coffee mill in nearby Antigua where it's processed. Starting with whole cherry, the mill has an added layer of control over isolating the coffee by grade, making sure that only ripe cherry makes it into the top grades. They remove the over-ripe and uder-ripe coffee using methods like floatation before the coffee is depulped, and then long washing channels after fermentation.

Total Score : 86.8