Collection: EL SOCORRO

This is a Direct Trade coffee between 20grams Coffee Roastery and producer Juan Diego De La Cerda.

Guatemala El Socorro is multi award winning farm located within a half hour of Guatemala City in the town of Palencia. We are fortunate enough to have procured coffees from this farm. This lot is a Yellow Bourbon varietal that really impressed us with its sweetness when we evaluated it initially. We were also offered their Maracaturra and Pacamara varietal which we have procured.

All the coffees procured are 'washed' process coffee, meaning that the fruit pulp is washed away. Coffee is fruit and the cherries, once ripe and harvested, have their outer skin removed by a specialized machine. The beans, really the cherry's seeds, are encased in the center of the fruit's flesh which ferments over the course of a day or two and is then washed away before being dried.

Because the farm is located at a high altitude and can get hot during the day, it has a unusual and highly effective processing technique for all of their coffee. The natural springs on the farm used in the wet mill provide very cold water. Juan and Juan Diego came to feel that plunging the hot, freshly harvested cherries into the cold spring water was causing two problems: shock and extended fermentation time, both of which they felt to be injurious to the final cup. Instead, they experimented with washing the harvested coffee in warm water, settling on a temperature nearly the same as the cherries' internal temperature (about 38C). They attribute much of their success to this technique. The farm's success is the result of a strict quality control during whole process, since the management of the plantation, handpicking, wet mill and drying coffee is all done on the farm.