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We deliver the finest South American Gourmet Coffees in attractive gift baskets and if you desire the ultimate coffee experience, you can even visit an exotic coffee plantation—All this, right from here! |
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| Guatemala |
| Antigua is where the story of coffee begins in Guatemala. In the mid-1700s Jesuit -monks brought the first coffee plants to the colonial city of Antigua, ironically, as ornamental plants for the gardens in their monastery. |
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During the last half of the 1700’s, the economy depended on two export crops, both coveted in the Old World as textile dyes: the blue indigo and the red cochineal, the latter an insect that grows on the leaves of cactus.
In 1800, the indigo plantations were devastated by a plague of locusts, from which the industry never recovered.
Anxious to find a substitute for this vital export crop, farmers planted coffee on an experimental basis in the Antigua valley.
By 1845, interest in coffee had become so serious, that a 16-page manual was published giving detailed instructions of everything -from selecting the proper terrain to planting, to diseases, to harvesting, to milling.
Then, the invention of synthetic dyes in the middle of the century demolished Guatemala’s remaining source of foreign exchange. By the 1860s, the cochineal industry, like indigo before it, dyed.
The government began to encourage coffee growing by suspending export taxes on it, and the Catholic Church also reduced its hold on coffee.
Propelled by these incentives, coffee swiftly filled the vacuum left by the fall of indigo and cochineal. Large scale production soon began in the regions of Fraijanes, Coban, Atitilan, and San Marcos.
By 1859, three and a half million coffee trees were already planted in the country. The same year marked Guatemala’s first commercial coffee production: 383 x 60-kilo bags – almost all of it sent to Europe.
In the following year, production tripled to 1,117 bags. And with this, the coffee industry took off.
Hard bean grade coffees from the central highlands (Antigua, Atitlan) tend to exhibit a rich, spicy or floral acidity and excellent body. Coffees from mountainous areas exposed to either Pacific (San Marco) or Caribbean (Coban, Huehuetenango) weather tend to display a bit less acidity and more fruit. |
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