Guatemala Finca Rabanales
From: £9.50
A fruit-a-licious white honey processed coffee with notes of white peach and a gorgeous honey sweetness.
Farm: Finca Rabanales
Producers: The Ventura Family
Altitude: 1630m above sea level
Variety: Mundo Novo
Process: White Honey
Region: Fraijanes
Don Gregorio Zamora founded Finca Rabanales – now run by his great great grandchildren, this farm has been in the family for five generations.
Of the five siblings that make up the family, Rafael and Maria Elena manage the farm on a daily basis. Rafael manages the technical field details, whilst Maria Elena supports the cupping operations.
The farm didn’t start out with coffee – it originally farmed livestock. Don Gregorio Zamora planted coffee in 1894. From the beginning, the Ventura’s have been guided by their commitment to producing high quality coffee, something that has been passed on to each generation.
The family’s vision is to share their coffee with the world, and gain recognition for their high cup quality. When our export partners the Coffee Bird first met Finca Rabanales, they weren’t yet working in the speciality market. For five generations, coffee had been good business – but since the 1980’s, coffee prices have consistently been dropping. They knew they had good coffees, but they weren’t sure how to market them. Rafael says that the Coffee Bird business model is unique, and has helped them branch out into speciality. Since 2014, they have bought coffee from them every year and helped them to expand into the speciality market.
Finca Rabanales is one of the few that are still located within the limits of Guatemala City.
This particular coffee is processed using the white honey method (although no actual honey is involved). If the natural process involves drying the coffee with the cherry still attached, imparting some of its fruitiness to the final product, and the washed method entails removing that cherry before drying, then the honey process is somewhere in between.
Instead of removing all the cherry, a thin layer called the mucilage is left on, imparting some—but not all—of its flavour into the coffee bean. The white honey designation refers to the amount of mucilage left on—you can also get red honey or black honey, which are processed with more mucilage and have more fruity notes.
