Guatemala Blue Ayarza Red Honey *TOP LOT*

This honey process Guatemala Blue Ayarza comes from various smallholder farmers in the Ayarza region.

The Art of Production:

What is important in the honey process? Everything. Our honey is produced in small batches, patio dried one at a time. Before we process there is a lot of work that goes into bean selection, harvest timing, dry depulping, line set up, etc. For starters we wait until the harvest is beyond its peak. This ensures that only the highest altitude cherry is being picked and our mill, positioned at 1,500 meters is only receiving cherries from 1,500m and up. When the coffee starts being delivered we form special day lots of the best cherry deliveries.These often come from the “pickuperos” as we call them as they bring small loads of 10-20 bags of cherry in pickup trucks. We let the cherry sit in bags on the patio to start the fermentation overnight. This overnight
fermentation helps develop the complexity and sweetness in the cup.
The following day we de-pulp the coffee and spread it directly on the patio. We use a specific dry pulper to preserve more of the mucilage on the bean. For the first two days we leave the coffee on the patio to dry without turning to allow the initial water to dry out of the fruit or mucilage.

The Region:

The region of Ayarza is a special one, landmarked by the drastic landscape and cold blue water from the Laguna de Ayarza and Laguna Azul. The lake was formed by two massive volcanos that collapsed and formed a large crater. The legends surrounding this lake are numerous and the bottom has never been found. There is a large white rock of a petrified woman who didn’t follow the orders of Jesus. In short, there are simply too many good stories about Ayarza to do it justice!

Olam Guatemala always knew the region had massive potential to produce specialty coffee, but the cups that we found were usually solid but unsurprising. Two years ago we rented a wet mill at 1,500 meters on a RFA certified farm. The quality coming from our washed coffee was much better than we expected. Next we tried some naturals by buying cherry in Ayarza and transporting it to a region that had plenty of patios and good wind for drying. Lastly we tried honey process.

For this 19/20 harvest we are doing our classic processes: washed, natural and honey. We are also testing the boundaries of processing with anaerobic fermentations and carrying out a set of 10 experiments, with extended fermentation times.