Working with La Planta Coffee Estates in Esquipulas, Guatemala
We love having a rotating Single Origin menu and offering coffees from different regions, but the best sellers are our blends: Wind & Sea, Shore Leave Hook, and Short Strand. The majority of green coffee we purchase goes into these blends, and for the most part, our partner importers have helped us source, contract, and finance just enough coffee for blenders to last us a certain period of time. While we wouldn’t be where we are without the help of importers, one of our goals is to develop more direct relationships with coffee producers. This allows us to have a better understanding of one another’s challenges, create plans for growth, and find ways to be successful together.
Red Pin: Esquipulas is on the border of Guatemala, neighboring El Salvador and Honduras.
Yellow pin the left: Bella Vista, Mexico. This is where our partners at Mayan Harvest Coffee are based.
Yellow pin to the right: Santa Elena, Honduras. This is where our partners at Catracha Coffee Co are based.
I met Erick Toledo in 2019 during our Q-Grader course, and I learned that he was a coffee producer in Esquipulas, Guatemala. He sold his family’s coffee on the commodity market, but he wanted to improve the quality of their coffee in hopes that they could receiving better pricing. Erick brought some green coffee samples with him in hopes that he could receive some feedback from anyone curious to taste his coffee. So, I invited him to stop by our roastery at the end of our exams and we could taste the coffees together. Erick spends a lot of time thinking about how to manage farm lands and creating organic fertilizers that the coffees will thrive on. He believes that coffees will taste good if you feed the coffee trees well, so he makes sure that the plants are provided with the right nutrients. Needless to say, we were impressed with the coffee samples he shared with us and we couldn’t believe that his coffee sold at commodity prices! We felt like his coffee would be perfect for our Short Strand blend, and we could definitely pay more than what he received from the commodity market. We maintained contact with Erick with the intentions of buying his coffee for the next harvest if the quality held up.
Banana trees help provide shade in coffee farms. When the banana trees are starting to die, the trunk is cut up into pieces and spread around the coffee trees.This helps coffee trees stay nourished during the dry season, because the trunk holds a lot of water and can keep the soil damp.
Erick (center) with his brother-in-laws Raul (left) and Rolando (right). This waterfall was hidden in the mountains, about an hour’s trek away from the farms. The hike was strenuous but well worth it!
In late January 2020, Michael and I flew out to Guatemala and spent a few days with Erick to see his family-owned farms at La Planta Coffee Estates and taste the coffees he and his family had to offer. We sample roasted and evaluated nearly 20 lots of coffees. There were a few objectives during this evaluation: first, we wanted to rate the coffees and provide SCA cupping scores. Sharing scores and the reasoning behind them is helpful to producers because they can see how their farming and processing procedures affect the final cup quality. Next, we wanted to group the coffee in different categories: the first category was for coffees of similar quality that we could mix together and use as our blend component for Short Strand; the second category was for coffees that should be sold separately as a single origin and at a higher price; and the third category was for coffees that were good, but of lower quality and should be sold to the commodity market. It’s important to note that we all calibrated beforehand and discussed our scores as a group after evaluation. Some of our scores varied, but when it came down to discussing flavor attributes, we essentially came to the same conclusions about each of the coffees. This kind of discussion is essential; if we relied only on scores, we could be missing out on some really great coffees or potentially include coffees that don’t quite hit the mark. At the end of the day, taste always triumphs over numbers.
Fighting caffeine exhaustion and atempting a group photo after several hours of non-stop cupping in the La Planta Coffee Estates Lab.
Our plan was to purchase around two-hundred 69kg bags of green coffee this year. That’s close to having a full shipping container! However, COVID-19 became a pandemic and affected coffee producing countries, including Guatemala. Countless cherries were left unpicked as a result of nationwide curfews and a shortage of labor, and port closures also affected the timing of shipping. Luckily, even before we knew COVID-19 was going to affect all of 2020, we had already created a back up plan in case there were any shipping delays. We were starting to cut it pretty close, but I’m happy to say that coffee from La Planta Coffee Estates successfully made it to our roastery about a week ago and it is already being used in Short Strand!
Having coffee and dinner at Coffee Shop Don Nicolas in Esquipulas
The pandemic has surely created an interesting environment for our first year of working together, but if anything, it’s only encouraged us even more to continue our partnership. With no clear vision in sight for when the pandemic will end, we’re doing our best to look forward and make plans for next year’s harvest. Will it be possible to produce and receive the amount of coffee we had initially planned for? Can we come up with more alternative plans if there is another lockdown, or if ports get backed up and shipping is delayed? Time will tell!
Views of Esquipulas from a coffee farm in La Planta Coffee Estates
