La Torre - Guatemala - 12oz Bag

La Torre - Single Estate - Tectitán, Huehuetenango, Guatemala - Washed - 12oz Bag

ROAST LEVEL : Medium Roast
VARIETALS : Bourbon, Caturra, Catimor
PROCESSING : Washed, 48-hour fermentation
ALTITUDE : 2,000m (6,560ft)
FARM : Rancho Las Vegas — Single Estate, 1.32 hectares
PRODUCER : Silvestre Justiniano Velásquez Morales
WE TASTE : Chocolate Covered Cranberries, Caramel, Walnut

Where it comes from

Guatemalan coffee is volcano coffee. Antigua, Atitlán, Acatenango, San Marcos — the country’s reputation was built on ash and lava soil. Huehuetenango is the exception. The mountains here are limestone, an ancient seabed folded upward rather than erupted, and they carry coffee higher than anywhere else in Guatemala.

Height like that normally comes with frost, and frost is what sets the ceiling on where coffee can be planted at all. Huehuetenango escapes it by an accident of geography: dry, hot winds blow in off Mexico’s Tehuantepec plain and hold the cold back from the slopes. That single quirk of weather is why Anacafé calls Highland Huehue the highest and driest non-volcanic coffee under cultivation in the country, planted up to 2,000 meters — exactly where this lot sits, right at the ceiling.

This is a single estate: one farm, one owner, one lot. Rancho Las Vegas covers 1.32 hectares — about three and a quarter acres — in Ixconolí, a hamlet in the municipality of Tectitán, out at the western edge of the department where Guatemala runs into Mexico. Silvestre Justiniano Velásquez Morales planted his first trees here eight years ago to answer a question rather than start a business: would coffee take to this ground at all? It did. The farm is named for the river it sits beside. The soil is clay loam, and he grows Bourbon, Caturra and Catimor — the varieties that proved themselves over several harvests of paying close attention to what the land would carry.

Most coffee, including most excellent coffee, is pooled. Cherry from dozens or hundreds of farms meets at a shared mill and leaves as a single lot, which is how smallholder regions reach the volume a buyer needs, and how a whole community shares the proceeds. A single estate is a different proposition. Everything in this bag grew on the same three acres, was picked by the same hands, fermented in the same tank, and dried on the same patio. There is no averaging. What you taste is one piece of ground, one microclimate, and eight years of one man’s decisions about both.

The region is remote enough that nearly every producer mills their own coffee. Rivers and streams run everywhere, so a wet mill can go almost anywhere, and the roads out are too long to make hauling wet cherry worthwhile. Silvestre ferments for 48 hours and dries on open patios in the sun.

Where the name comes from

The Sierra de los Cuchumatanes runs some 400 kilometers across Huehuetenango and Quiché — the highest non-volcanic range in Central America. The name is Mam: cuchuj, to join, and matán, with great force. What was joined together with great force. For a range built by folding a Cretaceous seabed up into limestone, that is close to a literal description.

Its summit is La Torre, 3,837 meters, the roof of the department. Above about 3,500 meters snow falls between November and February — worth saying out loud, in Guatemala.

We name our coffees for the mountains that stand over them. In Guatemala that almost always means a volcano. This one doesn’t, and that is exactly the point. What makes Huehuetenango taste like Huehuetenango is that it isn’t volcanic: limestone instead of ash, altitude instead of heat, and a dry wind off the Mexican plain keeping frost away from fields that sit higher than coffee has any business growing.