Country: GUATEMALA
Department: Huehuetenango
Municipality: Concepción Huista
Town: Concepción Huista
Cooperative: El Sendero
Altitude: 1,600 – 2,000 metres above sea level
Variety: Bourbon, Caturra, Pache San Ramón
Processing: Fully Washed
Contributing Producers: Luis Ramírez, Francisco Gaspar, Nicolas Jiménez, Daniel Salucio
Farm size: 3 hectares

Pink Lady apple, red berries and citrus. Generous, complex and floral.

About El Sendero (with thanks to Melbourne Coffee Merchants)

This coffee was produced by four smallholder coffee producers who are members of the El Sendero Cooperative, located in the municipality and town of Concepción Huista, in Guatemala’s state of Huehuetenango.

The farms that contributed to this lot are very small – on average just 3 hectares in size – and are located between 1600-2000m above sea level, in the steep, rugged hills that surround Concepción. Farmers in the region benefit from abundant freshwater, thanks to the local Rio Azul (Blue River) and its tributaries. All coffee in town is grown under the shade of Chalum trees (a local variety of Inga) and Gravillea, though the amount of shade needs to be managed carefully every year due to HueHue’s humid, temperate climate. Coffee is also intercropped with other fruit trees like avocados, lemons, oranges, and peaches.

Most farms in Concepción Huista are planted with the traditional Bourbon and Caturra varieties, with Pache introduced in more recent years. Coffee here is farmed with traditional techniques and organic practices, as most producers have been growing the crop their whole lives. Coffee pulp is recycled and dried to be used as fertiliser, and sedimentary tanks are employed to treat the water used during processing. All weeding is done manually, and few chemical pesticides or fertilisers are utilised—though fungicide is applied before flowering, to prevent roya outbreaks. Like all small-scale farmers in Huehuetenango, members of El Sendero are proud to selectively hand-harvest their cherry and process it at their own farms, with most labour being provided by the farmers and their families.

ABOUT EL SENDERO COOPERATIVE

Founded in 2018, the El Sendero Cooperative has a deep connection to Concepción Huista’s farming community. What began as a project with 33 founding members, now includes over 700 contributing farmers (400 of whom are coffee producers) who are led by managing director Pablo Gaspar, who is deeply passionate about ensuring local coffee growers receive fair and timely compensation for their crop. Before founding El Sendero, Pablo was a coffee producer himself. Life for the Gaspar family was challenging because Pablo would only receive partial payment for his crop on delivery (typically in March/April), and then in full several months down the track — sometimes as late as August. At the time, he had been volunteering as part of the management team for a coffee association that supported farmers in HueHue, that was founded using a grant from a local government program. Once those funds ran out, Pablo and a handful of his colleagues began discussing the option of starting their own co-operative, to ensure every farmer member received the financial support needed to establish a successful coffee farm. As Pablo told us on our most recent visit, “We figured, if banks can provide funds for average joes, why can’t we provide the same service to our own farmers?”

And so, Pablo set out to find farmers willing to invest enough capital to start the cooperative. He knew the minimum requirement was eighteen, and he initially had a hard time convincing more than fifteen of his colleagues to join. As the deadline for their application drew nearer, an influential member of the town decided to show her support for the initiative, turning the tide for Pablo and El Sendero. Once the co-op was officially up and running, more local farmers began to deposit their savings into the cooperative, earning them a better interest and strengthening El Sendero’s finances, which in turn benefited members who needed support. Today, the El Sendero’s finances are very healthy because of how quickly their contributor numbers have swelled. To join, farmers only have to pay a 250 Quetzal fee (around $50 AUD), which gets deposited into the cooperative’s general funds. Members then have access to the organisation’s financing, social programs, technical advice and support, and low-cost fertiliser and farming inputs.

When the co-op set up their coffee program in 2019, they lacked the resources and infrastructure to compete with the coyotes (or middlemen) that would roam the town’s streets offering farmers cash on the spot for their cherry. As Pablo explained, “We didn’t have offices or warehouses, so we rented a house in town and stored as much coffee as we could because we knew selling to coyotes was not good business for farmers.” As the co-op grew, they received a grant that helped them build facilities in 2022, where they established a warehouse, cupping lab and roastery. The warehouse includes a set of digital scales, which has furthered bolstered the trust members have on the co-op.

Besides providing its members with financial services and yearly training sessions on the best agricultural practices to follow, El Sendero roasts and distributes its members’ coffee locally. The co-op has also invested time and resources into creating a richer sense of community among its members by regularly organising farmers markets, soccer tournaments, and fairs. When we asked Pablo how El Sendero has found so much success in a seemingly short period of time, he proudly boasted, “because our town grows the best coffee in HueHue!”

By partnering with exporters like Prisma Coffee Origins, who in turn connects them to buyers like MCM, El Sendero has guaranteed its members with the financial stability the local coyotes never could. Pablo and Prisma’s founder Eduardo Ambrosio connected through a common acquaintance at Anacafe (Guatemala’s coffee institute) in early 2023, which led to a very fruitful meeting at El Sendero’s offices in Concepción Huista in March. Eduardo and brother Edwin, who oversees the company’s QA program, recognised the huge potential for quality in the lots they cupped, and were impressed by the traceability offered and the meticulous selection and quality control practices in place. El Sendero, which is Spanish for the path or trail, is an apt name for the cooperative, as their efforts and forward-thinking approach are leading the way to a brighter future for Concepción!

ABOUT CONCEPCIÓN HUISTA

Concepción Huista has been a settlement of the Jakalteko people since the early 1600s. The area was then part of the larger Jacaltenango municipality, but after refusing to contribute funds to the building of the local church, they separated and officially became their own municipality in 1672. Locally, Jacaltenango is known as Xajlaj, which translates to “place of the big white rock slabs,” in reference to the plateau overlooking Mexico that the town sits on.

The Jakalteko are one of Guatemala’s 24 Mayan people groups, and due to Jacaltenango’s remote location, they have also historically been one of the country’s most isolated communities. Up until the mid 1970s, a trip to the municipality involved a two-day, 72 km walk from Huehue’s capital—and electricity only came to the town in 1979. Due to this, the Jakalteko have been able to keep many of their customs intact and nearly 80% of the municipality’s population is fluent in the Jakalteko Mayan language.

Because of its prodigious soil and climate, the people of Concepción Huista have always been involved in agriculture, and today a staggering 97% of its inhabitants make a living from it. Coffee is particularly well-suited to the region—as recent as twenty years ago, the crop was able to grow without the need for fertilisers or other inputs, though this no longer the case due to the effects of climate change. Over the last decade, mining multinationals have pushed to establish gold mines to exploit the region’s mineral-rich soils. The community has banded together and fought hard against this, as they know it would have resulted in serious environmental damage to the tributaries that lead to the Azul River, Huista’s main fresh water source.

ABOUT HUEHUETENANGO

Huehuetenango (or HueHue as it is often called) is a stunning region located in the west of Guatemala near the border of Mexico. HueHue is known for being home to the Cuchumatanes mountain range, the highest non-volcanic mountain range in Central America, and for its vast ethnic diversity, which includes the Mam, Q’anjob’al, Chun and Jakalteko people. Before the Spanish invasion, the region was known as Xinabajul, which translates to “between ravines” in the local Mam language and is a reference to the numerous cliffs and steep hills found throughout the department. Pre-colonisation, the region’s largest city was Zaculeu (found in the outskirts of modern Huehue City), which translates to “white earth,” and whose ruins can still be visited today.

The department is vast, and includes a number of types of terrain that are suited to different forms of agriculture, depending on the elevation. Corn is the main staple of the lower regions, which transitions into coffee the further up one goes, with local pine farmed throughout the entire department. Huehue’s coffee-growing regions produce some of the most complex and celebrated lots in the country, and the region frequently appear in the top ten of the Cup of Excellence competition. This is in part due to the incredibly high elevations that coffee can grow (up to 2,000m above sea level), thanks to the dry, hot winds that blow into the mountains from Mexico’s Tehuantepec plain and protect the region from frost. These high elevations combined with a relatively predictable climate make for exceptional quality coffee. The highest elevations in Huehue, above 2,100m above sea level, are quite dry and rocky, so most farmers dedicate themselves to growing potatoes and herding sheep, goats and llamas.

HOW THIS COFFEE WAS PROCESSED

The El Sendero Cooperative provides training sessions to all its members at the beginning of every harvest, to remind them of the best practices to follow during the picking and processing of their coffee. This is important Pablo explained, because every member processes their own cherry using their own infrastructure that they have built on their farms. While the bigger farms have set up microbeneficios (small wet mills) with raised beds onsite, the smaller producers rely on tiny tanks and thick, plastic tarps to wash and dry their coffee.

Activities begin as early as January in the lower elevation farms, and as late as March in the higher up regions. Because all cherry is hand-picked by farmers and their families, a lot of care goes into the selection of each bean, and multiple passes are required. Coffee is pre-fermented in sacks for up to 24 hours early in the harvest, yet it can be as short as 12 hours once the weather begins to warm up in March.

Cherries are then washed and depulped, and left to ferment overnight (or up to 12 hours). The following day, this wet parchment is washed again using fresh water from the nearby Río Azul, and laid to dry on raised beds, concrete patio, or a thick, plastic tarp placed on gravel, depending on what the producer has at their disposal. Drying takes around a week, depending on weather conditions, until beans reach an adequate and stable moisture content.

Once coffee is dry, it is picked up by the El Sendero Cooperative, where lots are stored at their warehouse and separated based on quality at their cupping lab. Once approved by Prisma’s team, farmers are paid within the week of their crop being sold, and parchment is milled and prepared for export near Guatemala City. Prisma are hoping to build their own dry mill in the coming years, as a way to minimise risk and give them more control of the quality of the coffees they export.