GUATEMALA HUNCHOUEN

Recommended Retail Price: £12.50/250g

Tasting Notes: Clean and balanced, this coffee has dried apricot and prune acidity, caramel sweetness and cacao nibs through the finish. A well rounded, versatile option.

Region: Huehuetenango
Altitude: 1800-1900 m.a.s.l.
Variety: Bourbon, Caturra, Pache
Processing: Washed

UK Arrival: July 2025

This regional lot is our first from the importer Caribbean Goods. Guatemalan by birth, founder Javier Gutierrez’s mission, to trade fairly sourced coffee with a transparent supply chain, is squarely in line with our own. They donated 20 pence per kilo of this coffee contracted to an education nonprofit for indigenous girls, MAIA. We’re serving this coffee as our house espresso for milky drinks. 

The Coffee 

This coffee was grown by the Tajumuco Coop, which includes over 550 smallholders farmers in the northwest highlands of Huehuetanango. They harvest their coffee between December to April. After picking, each farmer processes their own cherries, removing the mucilage and drying them on a patio or rooftop. Once the coffee is dry they deliver it, called parchment at this stage, to the Tajumuco Coop and get paid. The coop then sells it on to the dry mill. A single cooperative might deliver 20 or more small lots to the mill over the harvest season. Each lot is cupped on arrival and if approved, it gets added into the “cooperative lot.” At the end of the season, after covering expenses like technicians and mill operations, the mill distributes profits and premiums for higher scoring lots back to the coop, which passes them on to the farmers. 

The Importer

Javier works directly with the people at the drymill to select the lots he’ll buy. “They set aside the best-scoring lots for us to evaluate,” he explains. “We then cup across different cooperatives and choose the standouts.”

This season he chose the coffee grown by the farmers of the Tajumuco coop because it was cleaner, brighter and more consistent. He also knows the president of the coop and is familiar with their practices, so he felt confident that the lot would be consistently high quality. 

There’s often a range of quality and consistency can be a problem. “I keep direct relationships with several coops, often chatting with managers on WhatsApp. Quality can vary: some farmers deliver excellent coffee, others bring in defective lots, and unfortunately it is not consistent,” Javier tells us. 

That’s why he decided to use his own lot names, like Hunchouen, when selling coffee to roasteries. He named this coffee Hunchouen in honor of the Mayan deity of art and music. 

“I always try to return to the same coop each year,” he says. “The long-term idea is to keep working with the same coops, give feedback, and grow with them.” But establishing relationships and building trust takes time. As a fledgeling importer, just beginning to give feedback to producers, Javier decided to curate and manage the coffee he uses in order to maintain quality and build a strong customer base (like us, and by extension, you) who appreciate consistent quality. 

Growing up Javier witnessed poverty, extreme violence and a lack of educational opportunities. These experiences inspired him to become an activist and to try to make the world better. On of the ways he does that is by donating 20 pence for every kilo of this coffee sold to MAIA, an education nonprofit for indigenous Guatemalan girls. With our purchase of this coffee, they’ll donate £278.40 to MAIA. Javier put the impact of this into perspective by explaining that $7.50 USD covers a week of meals in the MAIA canteen. So they’re effectively donating the equivalent of about 50 weeks—or nearly a year—of meals.

To find out more about their work together, check out this interview Javier did with MAIA leader, Vilma Saloj: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BC914v2rtU8.

Coffee in Guatemala

The history of coffee in Guatemala follows familiar lines of colonial introduction, post-independence land reform and indigenous disenfranchisement. The impacts of this colonial history were compounded by agricultural exploitation by the United States in the early part of the 20th century, which culminated in a US-backed political coup in 1954. Over 30 years of civil war followed the coup, with repeating cycles of violence and repression. “Many of the issues that provoked the war—poverty, land distribution, hunger and racism toward indigenous people—are still issues today,” according to James Hoffmann in his World Coffee Atlas.

Coffee has been a cornerstone of the Guatemalan economy since the late 1800s. In 1880 it made up about 80 percent of the county’s exports. The industry took a massive hit in the early 2000s when prices stagnated below the cost of production and coffee leaf rust swept through Central America decimating entire harvests. Today, Guatemala is the 4th largest Arabica exporter worldwide, according to USDA data.

Like most other coffee growing origins, the vast majority of producers, 98 percent, are smallholders. Most of these farmers belong to a regional cooperative. When I asked Javier how farmers decide which coop to join he told me geography is the main driver, but relationships are what keep them there.

All the cooperatives in Guatemala belong to an umbrella organization called FEDECOCAGUA, the Federation of Cooperatives of Coffee in Guatemala, which is made up of around 20,000 small producers. Membership is free. FEDECOCAGUA was started in the 1960s, when a European man helped organize smallholders in Huehuetenango to protect themselves from coyotes (local traders who would exchange corn for future coffee at unfair rates). 

FEDECOCAGUA provides support and training to its member cooperatives in the form of technical assistance, financing and marketing. They also collectively own the dry mills in Huehuetenango. This tiered structure of cooperative ownership likely presents some unique possibilities and challenges for different stakeholders. 

With few exceptions Guatemalan farmers only grow Arabica coffee. A 2024 report by Anacafe, the national coffee association, outlines the state of the industry today. Daily Coffee News reported, “Despite lower fertilization costs since the pandemic era, many farmers continue to face increased production costs, leading to issues such as leaf rust disease and pests. These issues are being exacerbated by a lack of labor due to migration.”

DCN also notes that the report flagged the gyrations in the C market as being potentially detrimental to specialty coffee. If farmers can receive relatively high prices for non-specialty, many might not invest in the quality control needed to produce specialty. DCN reported, “Anacafe told the Guatemalan post that it is concerned about the decreasing price differential between specialty and non-specialty coffee, which has dropped from over $18 to $3 per 100 pounds. The trend could disadvantage Guatemalan coffee farmers who are producing specialty coffee, according to sources in the report.” This concern isn’t unique to Guatemala, it’s a challenge our industry faces globally and it highlights the need to address the cost/benefit analysis many producers face when deciding whether it’s worth the effort to invest in producing higher quality coffee.