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Doña Carmen Espresso Blend - Colombia & Guatemala | Medium/Dark Roast

Doña Carmen Espresso Blend - Colombia & Guatemala | Medium/Dark Roast

$18.00 USD
$18.00 USD
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Traceability of the Coffee

Roast Level: Dark Roast

Variety: Bourbon, Caturra, Castillo and Colombia

Roaster Tasting Notes: Milk Chocolate, Oranges and creamy body

Score: 85 points 

Crop Year: 2024

Process: Washed

Altitude: 1200 -1500 masl 

About Doña Carmen

In honor of my grandmother Doña Carmen, we created the perfect daily blend. A 60% El Alma from Guatemala and a 40% from El Cauca Colombia. Is the perfect match for your cream or non-dairy milk, with a chocolate and creamy taste. Taste amazing on espresso because the citrus from El Alma comes through in a settled way and blends delightfully with the chocolate notes. 

This carefully crafted blend features high-quality Arabica coffee beans  (Specialty grade) sourced from the lush, mountainous regions of Colombia and Guatemala. These beans are carefully roasted to bring out the rich and complex flavors of each origin, delivering a satisfying and balanced taste with notes of chocolate, caramel, and berries. 

El Alma-Guatemala

For three generations we’ve grown coffee in the highlands of Huehuetenango, and in the past twenty years, we’ve grown to partner with other producing families, cooperatives, and associations across Guatemala. Our mission is to connect these beautiful families and their coffees with roasters around the world.

A sustainable sourcing approach is similar to our strategy as farmers and sellers: everything has a home. From the 88+ COE submissions to the 82-point mill-outs and last picks sold to local consolidators, there's value. Our intention with Alma involves sourcing bright, fruited coffees of 84.5+ quality-- coffees with a lot of souls -- with our vendor partners from Huehue to Jalapa. Our QC team based in Guatemala is meticulously selecting a consistent, clean, and lightly fruity blend. La Alma means the Soul, and we hope this blend will be the vitality and warmth of your espresso or house coffee.

For every pound of Alma sold, $0.05 goes directly to our partners at Habitat for Humanity Guatemala to support their Smokeless Stove Program. These clean stoves have impacted families for decades by increasing indoor air quality and wood-fuel efficiency while decreasing cooking time. From the 2021 crop Alma sales alone, 42 families were able to receive a new stove. In the future, we plan to invest in home-building origin trips with volunteers from every link in the coffee value chain. 

El Cauca- Colombia 

Colombian coffee is among the most recognizable and most dynamic in the world, with multiple growing regions whose distinct yet consistently crowd-pleasing profiles reflect the various microclimates that exist in this large country. We source workhorse coffees from various of these growing regions, looking for a cup that contains a nice balance of sweetness, fruity effervescence, and a foundation of cocoa and/or toffee. Most Gran Galope offerings are a blend of coffees from between 10 and 30 smallholder farms, each with comparable cup characteristics and scores. Coffees from Huila are cupped and purchased in Pitalito; coffees from Cauca are cupped and purchased in Popayán, and coffees from Nariño are cupped and purchased in both Pasto and La Unión. 

Founded in 1927, the Federación Nacional de Cafeteros de Colombia is a large NGO that provides a wide variety of services and support to the country’s coffee producers, regardless of the size of their landholdings or the volume of their production. The marketing arm of the FNC develops campaigns to push not only international consumption of Colombian coffee but also, more recently, domestic consumption of specifically specialty-grade Colombian coffees. 

The FNC also guarantees a purchase price for any coffee grown within Colombia, which provides some degree of financial security to farmers: They have the option to find private buyers or break into specialty markets, or they can tender their coffee to the FNC and receive a somewhat stable (if also rather standard, influenced by the global commodities market) price at any point during the year. This is designed to eliminate some of the market pressures and provide reliable income to the coffee sector, though it also comes under criticism for disincentivizing the development of super-specialty lots and micro-lots.

The scientific arm of the organization, Cenicafé, is devoted to research, development, dissemination, and support throughout the country. A wide-ranging extension service employing more than 1,500 field workers is deployed to meet and consult with farmers on soil management, processing techniques, variety selection, disease prevention and treatment, and other agricultural aspects of coffee farming. 

We have had boots on the ground (and spoons in the cup) here since our earliest days, and we fall in love over and over again with the regional variations, the varieties, the landscape, and the producers themselves.  From our celebration of the taste of place with Regional Selects from Cauca to the discovery and development of micro-lots from all over the country with our export partners and the producers with whom they work closely—we simply can’t get enough.

 

Coffee Process

While the processing details might vary slightly from farm to farm or by association, generally the coffee is picked ripe and depulped the same day, then given an open-air fermentation in tanks or buckets for anywhere between 12–36 hours. The coffee is washed clean of its mucilage before being dried either on patios, in parabolic dryers, solar driers, or mechanically. Some Washed coffees in Colombia and Guatemala are mechanically demucilaged.

 

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