Our Guatemalan coffees come from families we have worked with across many harvests: the Diaz family in Santa Rosa, the de la Cerda family near Palencia, and the Palacios and Vides families in Huehuetenango. Their farms span volcanic slopes and remote highlands, bringing different growing conditions, varieties, and approaches to processing to our lineup.

Coffee became Guatemala’s leading export in the second half of the nineteenth century. Its expansion was closely tied to the transfer of communal land into private estates and laws that compelled rural people, many of them Indigenous Maya, to work on farms.

Land reform after the 1944 revolution attempted to redistribute idle estate land, but much of that reform was reversed following the U.S.-backed coup in 1954. The country’s long internal armed conflict ended with peace accords in 1996.

After international coffee export quotas ended in 1989, Guatemala increasingly competed on quality, developing the regional identities familiar today. More recently, coffee leaf rust, rising costs, and a warming climate have challenged growers. The work of renewing farms and sustaining coffee-growing communities continues alongside the pursuit of exceptional coffee.