How I became a coffee producer.

The historical circumstances that shaped a region, and myself.

The Valley of Antigua Guatemala. Framed by the Agua, Fuego and Acatenango Volcanoes.

My name is Josue Morales and I have been in the coffee industry since 2003. It was back then, in the summer of 2003, when I first held a fist full of coffee seeds that would become my first purchase.

When I was choosing, or rather guessing what to choose to purchase for my first bag of coffee, I was boldly trying to look like someone who knew what he was doing. I didn’t. I could feel the shame running down my spine.

I was being asked if I wanted Pergamino or Oro which are the two terms used to trade coffee in the internal market of Guatemala. Pergamino refers to the coffee that still has an outer protective skin, the one we call parchment in English. Oro is the name it receives after the parchment is removed and the seed has been cleaned and prepared to be either roasted or exported.

I nervously answered “pergamino” because it was the cheaper option. Little did I know that it still needed further cleaning before I could roast it, and that it loses an average of twenty to twenty two percent in weight when removing the skin.

This took place in Huehuetenango, during a University project. The main reason why I bought that bag of coffee was that I wanted to take back with me something that would remind me of that semester I spent there. At that point, I hadn’t even the slightest idea if this could be a sound business to pursue.

The one hundred pounds I bought ended up being roughly 64 pounds of roasted coffee. I kept some to drink at home and gave away the rest to some of my teachers and some to friends of my parents.

A friend of my parents called me up some weeks later and told me she loved the coffee and would like to purchase thirty pounds of ground coffee from me.

That was my Aha! moment.

I asked the people I had met in Huehuetenango to send me another “quintal” of coffee, which is the name we give to a one hundred pounds bag. They couldn’t. They didn’t have any coffee left. This is how I learned that the coffee from each harvest is usually sold all at once.

Coffee in “Pergamino” to the left and “Oro” to the right.

By chance, my family had a friend who owned a coffee farm in Huehuetenango. I called him and asked if he had any coffee left, I explained to him that I needed only a small stock, that I would like to roast it and sell it. Fortunately, he did have some coffee and he was willing to save it for me.

His name is Alejandro Solís, owner of Finca Huixoc in Huehuetenango. He became my first direct relationship in the coffee business. From that moment on, I have purchased his coffee every single year without interruption. This is the moment that marked the beginning of the times I describe in my previous article What does specialty coffee mean to me?

Finca Huixoc was founded in 1947 by don Alejandro’s grandfather, becoming the first coffee farm in the region of Huehuetenango. This is one of the most remote areas in my country, Guatemala. Back when this farm was founded, they were blowing up the mountains with dynamite to build the roads to bring in the machinery that would process the coffee at the farm. Those very same machines are still running and processing coffee at this farm until today.

This region is blessed with high altitudes and very specific rain patterns. Because it’s very mountainous, it creates a wide variety of micro-climates that allow for the profile of coffee to have a very important acceptance in the taste preference of consumers.

During the first nine years of my career, I concentrated most of my efforts in growing with the coffee from this region as my flagship. It took me years to make the friendships that would take me from one corner of the mountains to another. 

One farm owner would introduce me to the neighbor, and their neighbors in turn would introduce me to the communities of small shareholder producers. Then these producers would introduce me to the leaders of their communities, and so on. Eventually, that’s how I ended up helping to create many cooperatives in the Huehuetenango area.

Alejandro Solis and Josue Morales at Finca Huixoc. March, 2014.

This region was a good place to start but it was still an emerging region in the history of coffee from Guatemala. When I started traveling to meet the roasters with whom I worked, it was notorious that the consummate leader of Guatemalan coffee was the Region of Antigua Guatemala.

I spent the summer of 2011 in Los Angeles, California, with the purpose of understanding the trends that were emerging for Specialty Coffee in the United States. I must have walked the entire city going from one coffee shop to another. I must have visited multiple times every coffee business in the city. I had taken hundreds of coffee samples that I would deliver at each one of these businesses.

I was able to experience as a customer the businesses whose names would give meaning to some of my most treasured friendships in years to come. But during that summer it was a very different story. I came back to Guatemala having sold no coffee at all.

However, I had learned a few things. First, that the coffee market was in a critical moment where interesting things were about to happen. Second, that I had drank more coffee from Antigua Guatemala in those three months than in all my life prior to that trip. Coffee from this region was the main constant everywhere I went.

Antigua Guatemala has a special place in the history of coffee because for over a hundred years it was synonymous with high grown and high quality coffee produced in Guatemala.

One hundred years ago, coffee wasn’t produced on the volcanoes or the high mountains of the country. The production was concentrated in the more fertile lowlands in the South Pacific area of Guatemala or in the Caribbean Basin that stretches into the rainforest in the region of Cobán.

The first coffee seeds that came to Guatemala were planted by the Jesuit missionaries in the courtyard of the Compañía de Jesús in the center of Antigua. These coffee plants were ornamental and would remain there for decades until some of their seeds were used to start a small coffee plantation right outside where Guatemala City would be founded many years later.

Coffee became the official agricultural strategy for Guatemala in 1871 and by 1880 it was the main crop being produced. Production became widespread primarily in the areas of the Bocacosta or the region formed between the Pacific Ocean and the chain of Volcanoes, with lands characterized by being flat, lower in altitude and extremely fertile, as opposed to the mountainous and volcanic areas where most of the indigenous population was relocated for being lands considered inappropriate for coffee production.

The Valley of Antigua Guatemala was a different story because of its vast extension of very fertile land that is flat. The strategic position between the volcanoes of Agua, Fuego and Acatenango create the perfect weather conditions for coffee to thrive at altitude.

During the period of time when coffee was pushed as a national agenda, Antigua became the most notorious for its high quality coffee, because its altitude gave it a stronger, more complex, and more expressive cup taste than the coffee being produced in low or mid altitude.

In the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, the coffee from Guatemala was already being recognized and awarded for its cup quality in Europe and in the United States. The coffee from Antigua Guatemala remained as the leading standard for this quality throughout the twentieth century.

The culture for this quality was so embedded in the culture of the industry that, even twenty years ago, professional coffee tasters would categorize a coffee that presented a certain profile of acidity and complexity as being “Genuine,” a nickname for exceptional cups among coffee professionals inspired by the fact that Antigua became one of the first coffee growing regions in the world to have a protected denomination of origin called “Genuino Antigua.”

The Brown and Yellow areas mark where coffee was initially cultivated in Guatemala during the 1800's.

With the emergence of specialty coffee roasters in the United States, buyers from Peet’s and Starbucks, and many others that followed during the 1980’s and 1990’s gravitated towards this famous coffee region by default. It was no coincidence that almost all the Guatemalan coffee I found during the time I spent in Los Angeles came from Antigua.

It was obvious to me that if I wanted to grow my business and to succeed in the United States, I had to become part of the Region of Antigua.

Contrary to the rest of the country where small producers grow and process their own coffee having the autonomy to sell it as a somewhat finished product to the best bidder, the Region of Antigua is composed of historic Estates that have had a very well established market for generations.

The small producers that do exist in the region of Antigua sell their coffee in cherry, or ripe off the trees, to the established farms that further process and export them. So in this dynamic there was little to no interest in my business proposal for traceability. The prices being paid to any farm in Antigua were already among the highest of any producing region in the world.

I had been wishing to work with coffee from Antigua for years. I was aware of the historical significance of the region. But it was only after my complete failure to connect with the market in the United States that I understood the weight this region has before the eyes of the industry. It was only then that my wish became a necessity.

I started looking immediately. The number of Estates in Antigua is very small. I knew by name each and every one of the doors that I had to knock on. They would receive me and they would listen to me and they would treat me with great kindness. But they had no interest in working with me. Their businesses were already consolidated, from generations ago. I needed them badly. They didn’t need me at all.

This went on and on. No matter how many times I asked, or how hard I tried, the answer would always be the same because I had nothing new to offer. I was discouraged. More and more discouraged every time. Frustrated almost to the point of giving up.

Then, any given afternoon in the middle of 2013, having a personal conversation with a fellow exporter, he asked me a very peculiar question: If there was one thing that would have the greatest impact on the success of my company, what would this one thing be? I spit it out without even thinking about it: Coffee from Antigua!

It turned out that his company owned this little farm right outside of Antigua. It wasn’t much, but he would let me use it, if I wanted to. Of course I wanted to! We coordinated the visit.

The farm was very small, indeed. The grass in the central courtyard was as tall as my waist. The place looked battered and time worn. The soil looked like a sand box. Not even weeds were growing. The shade trees were being replaced because they were dead and coffee was to be replanted after collapsing during the leaf rust crisis.

Beneficio La Esperanza at sunrise. Antigua Guatemala. January, 2020.

Behind the farm was a “wet mill,” a factory to process coffee cherries. There were about a dozen trucks half dismantled parked in the driveway, multiple rusting machines and pipes lying around. Inside the buildings lay a dormant and half abandoned factory for coffee processing with one of the largest installed capacities in the country.

It looked and felt faded, like a ghost town. The day was gray and rainy by the time I left.

I had been working in coffee for ten years by the first time I set foot at Beneficio La Esperanza.

Upon seeing it for the very first time, I knew this was the place that would define my career, my success, and who I would become.

I didn’t find this place; the place found me. From one day to another, it made me a Coffee Producer in the Region of Antigua Guatemala.