The story
Coffee arrived in Guatemala in the late 18th century, according to the importer Cafe Imports, but it only became a serious crop in the 1860s. At that point the country's main export, the blue dye indigo, had failed. The government encouraged European immigrants to set up plantations and handed out seeds and young plants. By the late 1800s Guatemala was shipping close to 300 million pounds of coffee a year.
Today coffee is still a big part of rural life. Cafe Imports puts the number of people involved at around 500,000, and most farms are small, from 1 to 50 hectares. Many growers belong to one of the country's more than 20 recognised indigenous groups. Some work alone, and others sell through cooperatives. In 1960 growers formed their own union, which became Anacafé, the national coffee association. It runs research, helps with marketing and offers loans to farmers.
Recent years have been hard. From 2012, an outbreak of coffee leaf rust, a fungus that attacks the leaves, cut yields by as much as 25 percent, and the government declared a state of emergency. Farmers pruned harder, thinned shade trees and replaced vulnerable varieties such as Bourbon, Caturra and Catuaí with more resistant plants. Anacafé has worked with World Coffee Research on variety trials since then.
For a fairly small country, Guatemala has many distinct coffee regions. Cafe Imports lists Acatenango, Antigua, Atitlán, Chimaltenango, Cobán, Fraijanes, Huehuetenango and Nuevo Oriente, and Coffee Review also describes San Marcos. Antigua is the best known. It is a valley ringed by three volcanoes, Agua, Fuego and Acatenango, with farms mostly between 1,300 and 1,600 metres. Huehuetenango, near the Mexican border, has the highest farms in the country, reaching about 2,000 metres, with dry, rugged mountains. Atitlán's farms sit on the steep volcanic slopes around Lake Atitlán. Cobán has moist weather shaped by the Caribbean, San Marcos faces the Pacific and is wetter, Fraijanes is a high plateau with a sunny harvest season, and Nuevo Oriente, on the Honduran border, is cloudy and rainy.
Coffee Review notes that most regions have volcanic soil, but not all. Huehuetenango, for example, has limestone soil. Small growers dominate in Huehuetenango and Atitlán, where difficult terrain often keeps farms isolated, and many of their coffees are grown organically by cooperatives.
How it's processed
A coffee bean is the seed of a small fruit called a cherry. Once the cherries are picked, the fruit has to come off and the seed has to be dried.
In Guatemala the usual method is washed processing. The skin is removed, the sticky fruit layer underneath is cleaned away, and the beans are then dried. Cafe Imports describes Guatemalan coffee as washed or mechanically demucilaged, which means some mills use a machine to scrub off the sticky layer instead of letting it ferment away in tanks. Either way, the result is a clean cup where the region and variety show through.
Guatemala also grades its coffee by altitude. Strictly Hard Bean (SHB) is grown at about 1,600 to 1,700 metres, Fancy Hard Bean at 1,500 to 1,600 metres, and Hard Bean at 1,350 to 1,500 metres.
The harvest runs from about September to April. Common varieties are Bourbon, Caturra, Catuaí, Typica, Maragogype and Pache. Pache is a local one: World Coffee Research records it as a natural, compact mutation of Typica found in 1949 on a farm in Santa Rosa.
What it tastes like
Guatemalan coffee tends to balance sweetness with clear acidity. Coffee Review's Kenneth Davids sorts it into two broad styles: delicate, balanced cups that often have floral and fruit notes, and cups with more intense, simpler acidity. He also notes that dry weather during ripening usually means a sweeter coffee, and higher farms usually bring more acidity and nuance.
The regions differ in ways you can often taste. Cafe Imports describes Antigua coffees as sweet and smooth, with lower acidity, which makes them handy in blends. Atitlán coffees are described as nutty and chocolatey, with a lemony acidity and some floral notes. Huehuetenango coffees tend to be the most fruit-forward, with crisp apple-like and citrus acidity, a full body and toffee sweetness. Nuevo Oriente's steady, cloudy climate is said to give full-bodied, well-balanced coffee.
These are tendencies, not rules. The farm, the variety and the roast all shape the final cup, so the tasting notes on each coffee are the best guide.