Guatemalan Coffee Fest 2018

In Guatemala, 125 thousand families depend directly on coffee and generate around half a million jobs. Coffee is present in all the departments of the country, in 204 of the 340 municipalities. The economy of many of these municipalities depends almost exclusively on coffee production due to the type of soil, height and climate, factors that provide special characteristics to Guatemalan coffees.

Nowadays Guatemalan Coffee Source is working with farms from different regions from Guatemala, many of them decided to participate on the GUATEMALAN COFFEE FEST with the purpose of embracing the changes Coffee Industry has been experiencing over the last years and seeking their professionalism on growing worldwide quality coffee. From the participating farms we would like to make a special mention to the participation of the extraordinary women’s farms of “Women in Coffee“, who work very hard to show the world what they do on their farms and to enhanced Guatemalan coffee.

Guatemalan Coffee Fest is an event that brings together all the protagonists of the coffee chain with the aim of promoting internal consumption in a family, festive and educational environment.

The event takes place within the framework of the 4th. International Coffee Day, established by the International Coffee Organization, which this year has a special significance for our country to be declared the Guatemalan coffee as Intangible Cultural Heritage of the Nation.

During the Guatemalan Coffee Fest the participants had the opportunity to enjoy talks from exhibitors such as Héctor González talking about “Same Coffee, Different Flavors”, Zachary Dagget “How to differentiate your coffee shop?”, Juan Luis Alvarado “Identifying the special flavors of coffee” and Dulce Barrera “How to choose coffee to compete?”, all of them have national and international experience in the coffee world.

At the event, 36 baristas participated in the AeroPress Competition, an innovative coffee preparation method invented in 2005 by the American Alan Adler. The AeroPress method is composed of two plastic cylinders that work together like a syringe that introduces pressurized air over the mixture of water and ground coffee to filter the coffee through a paper filter or cylindrical metal, this shortens the time of infusion of coffee and reduces bitter flavors. Like the international competitions, the competition of AeroPress focused on the preparation of coffee, each cup was evaluated by a panel of judge tasters who identified the cup that managed to enhance the best characteristics. All participants used the coffee from the same farm and same variety.