Greetings,
We are a few weeks away from our Guatemalan coffee being in our hands, and yours! We have word that our container, which we filled with the addition of a couple other NW roasters, is due in 10 days. After which, it will need to clear the port, get trucked to a midway holder, then palletized and shipped up to us. It's a process, but we are close.
All three of us travelled down to Antigua this year at the end of February, for the better part of a week. It took work to get orders out through the weekend, fly a redeye to Guatemala city and then bus up to Antigua, but I think we are all glad we were all there together. Every year we spend most of the trip in the cupping lab at Bella Vista mill. It isn't exactly romantic and adventurous, but it is the only way we can sort through the best day lots of the best farms in Antigua and the surrounding regions. We cupped three days of the four we were there, and got out to see farms when we could. We sorted through 120 different lots to pick the 9 that we did.
We are super happy about the coffees we've locked down. We have some returning favorites from year's past, and a few new coffees from regions we haven't bought from before, one in particular that we think is going to be a superstar this season. Once we get all the coffees in house, we will be going through and testing each lot for water activity, roasting samples, building note profiles, and deciding the best order in which to release them. Then the fun begins: we get to share these beautiful coffees with all of you, our customers! That is always our favorite part.