Guatemala San Martin Jilotepeque

This lot is made up from the coffee of several small holders in and around the town of San Martin Jilotepeque, about 2 hours south of Antigua, in Guatemala's Chimaltenango Municipality. It's our second and final lot from this group. The farmers who are part of this project are banded together around Chepe Garcia, a local farmer himself, who's taken the job of organizing and collecting coffee cherry to be sold. Unlike some of the other Guatemala buying projects we are a part of, this one differs in that the coffee is sold by Chepe in whole cherry, not parchment. So instead of each individual lot being processed by the farmer, they are all mixed together each week and delivered to a coffee mill in nearby Antigua where it's processed. Starting with whole cherry, the mill has an added layer of control over isolating the coffee by grade, making sure that only ripe cherry makes it into the top grades. They remove the over-ripe and uder-ripe coffee using methods like floatation before the coffee is depulped, and then long washing channels after fermentation. San Martin Jilotepeque town is at about 1800 meters and Chepe's farm that we visited, Finca Magnolia, tops out at just over 1900 meters.