{"id":221,"date":"2011-02-11T08:20:24","date_gmt":"2011-02-11T08:20:24","guid":{"rendered":"dev.cafeimports.com\/blog\/2011\/02\/11\/cafe_imports_guatemala_origin\/"},"modified":"2018-09-20T15:33:21","modified_gmt":"2018-09-20T15:33:21","slug":"cafe_imports_guatemala_origin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dev.cafeimports.com\/north-america\/blog\/2011\/02\/11\/cafe_imports_guatemala_origin\/","title":{"rendered":"Origin Report: Guatemala 2011"},"content":{"rendered":"

 Guatemala Origin Trip<\/u><\/b><\/p>\n

This year’s origin trip brought together two Café Imports staff, 16 wonderful guests and one very special little girl. To put it mildly…the experience was outstanding. Anacafé<\/a> graciously hosted our event and traveled with us every step of the way offering all sorts of insight to the tour sites and Guatemalan culture. <\/div>\n
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Our minibus cruised the countryside in tight, get-to-know-you quarters, encouraging a bond to develop amongst the group of importers, exporters, roasters, baristas, coffee shop managers\/owners, educators, and plain old coffee lovers! Through this diversity, every step in the life of a coffee bean was discussed and debated, offering a real treat for my curious ears. Throughout the trip Tim C<\/a> revealed a fountain of information as he taught an in-depth coffee processing class on the drive, which was broken into parts depending on how car sick we were. The group asked excellent questions often resulting in tangents and discussions that exposed every single side of the coffee industry. <\/div>\n
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The scenery at our first tour stop, Lago Atitlán, was breathtaking. Three giant volcanoes towered over the golden coffee drying in pergamino with a clear blue sky and flowers and trees dotting the landscape around the wet mill. We toured tiny parcelas, or small plots of land growing coffee trees, and a seedling nursery with Francisco Mendoza, who not only owns six parcelas, but also manages the Chucumuc wet mill. He shared that he loves working with coffee because he is able to take care of the beans “desde semilla” (from seedlings) all the way through the processing, and his meticulous care shows.<\/div>\n
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The water taxi across the lake to the famous Panajachel and being bombarded by locals selling everything from gum to jewelry to shawls rounded out the true Lago Atitlán experience. <\/div>\n
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In stark contrast to the parcelas that dotted the side of the road in Atitlán was the El Retiro Estate we visited in the New Orient. We caravanned in six heavy-duty pickups through tiny towns up the most bumpy, dusty road I have ever encountered only to emerge upon a grand paradise. José Herrarte Osante fed us lunch, coffee, and cake on the veranda of his farm overlooking his pool and mountains surrounded by green, budding flowers and birds.     <\/span><\/div>\n
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We toured his giant farm (1 of 5, I might add) in awe of the towering trees that are 400-500 years old shading several varietals of coffee trees growing on rolling hills and his wet-mill where the best coffee stood out in the bright sunlight.                            <\/span><\/div>\n
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Surprisingly, the dry mill we visited was the most fascinating. Previously I thought, “well, a dry mill removes the parchment, how exciting can it be?” The coffee at this mill goes through five<\/i> steps! All of which continue the separation and quality control process.  By far, the most amazing was the last step of the optical sorter. The workers are able to set the machine to a certain number of defects and the sorter uses a high speed camera to detects color differences signaling a defective bean. The off-colored beans are removed by a jet of air. Check out the picture below to see how precise this technology is:  the beans on the left are before going in the machine and the beans on the right are after; this is the same coffee!          <\/span><\/div>\n
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We also had a chance to visit Guardería Las Nubes, which is a school sponsored by Coffee Kids<\/a> in conjunction with ADESPA in Acatenango. We spent several delightful hours being entertained with songs and dance by the kids while we shared our Frisbee skills, technological toys, and blonde hair. <\/div>\n
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The kids were amazingly happy, friendly, and proud of their school and home. I admire the local attitude in saying how thankful they are for the help from outside support, but that they are working diligently towards the day when they can say, “thank you but we no longer need you.”<\/div>\n
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Lastly, our group toured the Anacafé<\/a> and Unitrade<\/a> offices and Unitrade’s local &Café coffee shop. Unitrade hosted a cupping of coffees from the many growing regions in Guatemala…many were very young but full of potential an
\nd got me excited for the fresh crop! We are expecting new shipments of San Pedro La Laguna from Atitlán in April or May as well as the return of the ever popular FTO Huehue from Codech in March or April. We are also looking forward to some new microlots coming out of Guatemala this year, so stay tuned!<\/div>\n
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The tour was the complete package…a seedling nursery, small production areas, a true estate, a micro-wet mill, a larger wet mill, a dry mill, a local coffee shop, and exporter offices. We witnessed every step of coffee production from the baby seedlings to how they leave the country. I would like to extend a very special thanks to Anacafé and Unitrade for being such wonderful travel companions and hosts, to Tim C for his wealth of knowledge, and to the fine group of coffee lovers who took the time out of their busy schedules to join us…I was truly touched by the camaraderie of the group and this trip goes down in my personal history.<\/div>\n
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-Sally<\/a><\/div>\n

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 Guatemala Origin Trip This year’s origin trip brought together two Café Imports staff, 16 wonderful guests and one very special little girl. To put it mildly…the experience was outstanding. Anacafé graciously hosted our event and traveled with us every step of the way offering all sorts of insight to the tour sites and Guatemalan culture.    Our […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[79,17,18,78,50,76,77],"class_list":["post-221","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-guatemala","tag-anacafe","tag-cafe-imports","tag-coffee","tag-coffee-importing","tag-green-coffee","tag-guatemala","tag-origin-trip"],"site_id":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.cafeimports.com\/north-america\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.cafeimports.com\/north-america\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.cafeimports.com\/north-america\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.cafeimports.com\/north-america\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.cafeimports.com\/north-america\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=221"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dev.cafeimports.com\/north-america\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.cafeimports.com\/north-america\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=221"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.cafeimports.com\/north-america\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=221"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.cafeimports.com\/north-america\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=221"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}