Guatemala Chimaltenango Tecpán

The city of Tecpán sits in the northwest corner of the Chimaltenango Municipality, about an hour and a half from Guatemala City by car. Tecpán in Nahuatl language means “Mansion of the gods” or “mansion de los dioses” in Spanish, and it was the town of Iximche in Tecpán that was declared the first capital city of Guatemala by the Spanish. It's a very high altitude zone, and known for cold climate, especially at the higher reaches. This region has a median altitude of 2000 meters, which along with the cold climate, means slower coffee cherry maturation and very dense coffee beans. Not always a recipe for a good cup, it certainly helps to have a dense organic structure for sugar caramelization, and Tecpán has proved to be a very sweet, balanced cup. Bourbon and Caturra cultivars are also part of that recipe, the dominant cultivars of the region, and you see smaller amounts of Catuaí, Typica, and Anacafe-90 mixed in too. This coffee is a small producer blend from Tecpán, most farms with much less than 10 hectares of land. The effort is organized by a local farmer named Aurelio Salvador, who has taken charge of buying cherry from those in neighboring villages and coordinating the deliveries to the La Azotea mill on the other side of Chimaltenango, where the coffee is then centrally processed.