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Huehuetenango coffee: Guatemala's high north
Huehuetenango coffee grows up to 2,000 meters in Guatemala's far northwest, kept free of frost by dry winds from Mexico. How to say it and how it tastes.
Huehuetenango (say it way way teh NAHN go) is one of Guatemala's highest and driest coffee regions, in the northwest mountains along the border with Mexico. Anacafé, Guatemala's national coffee association, says hot, dry winds blowing in from Mexico's Tehuantepec plain keep frost off its slopes, so coffee can grow there up to about 2,000 meters. The washed coffee from those farms is known for a fine, intense acidity, a full body and a fruity, winey edge.
How to say it
Way way teh NAHN go, with the stress on NAHN. People in the trade often shorten it to Huehue, said way way. The name comes from Nahuatl, the language of central Mexico, and is usually translated as "place of the elders", though it may instead mean a place of ahuehuete trees.
Where it is
Huehuetenango is a department in the far west of Guatemala, and most of its northern and western edge is the border with the Mexican state of Chiapas. Above it rises the Sierra de los Cuchumatanes, the highest mountain range in Central America that is not volcanic. Its top, La Torre, reaches 3,837 meters. Coffee grows on the slopes and river valleys below the high plateau, often on ground too steep for anything but hand work.
That rock matters for how the region is described. Guatemala's other famous coffee regions, such as Antigua or San Marcos, sit among volcanoes. The Cuchumatanes are made of limestone and other sedimentary rock, and Anacafé counts Huehuetenango among the three coffee regions in Guatemala that are not volcanic, and the highest and driest of those three. If a bag calls Huehuetenango soil volcanic, it has the wrong mountain range in mind.
The wind that keeps frost away
Frost is what usually stops coffee climbing higher, because it burns the leaves and kills new growth. What protects Huehuetenango, according to Anacafé, is the air from Mexico's Tehuantepec plain: dry, hot winds that blow up into the mountains and keep the frost off. That is why coffee grows higher here than almost anywhere else in the country.
Anacafé's profile of the region gives these figures:
- Farms sit at 5,000 to 6,500 feet, roughly 1,500 to 2,000 meters.
- Temperatures run from 68 to 75°F (20 to 24°C).
- Rain comes to 48 to 56 inches a year.
- Humidity sits between 70 and 80 percent.
Height slows the cherries down, and a slow cherry tends to give a denser seed and a cup with more fruit and less bitterness. Guatemala grades its densest export coffee as Strictly Hard Bean, grown above 4,500 feet. Huehuetenango's farms clear that line with room to spare. Why altitude matters in coffee covers the reasons.
Remote farms that process their own coffee
Anacafé notes that the region is so remote that almost every producer has to process their own coffee, and that the many rivers make that possible. So most Huehuetenango coffee is washed on the farm: pulped the day it is picked, fermented in tanks, washed in river or spring water and dried in the sun.
Much of the region's coffee is grown by Maya families and picked by hand on very steep slopes, according to De La Gente, a nonprofit that works with Guatemalan coffee cooperatives. It puts the Huehuetenango harvest at December to April, with lower farms in Guatemala starting as early as September and the highest ones finishing last.
What Huehuetenango coffee tastes like
Anacafé's own description is "fine, intense acidity with a full body and pleasant wine notes." Roasters who sell it at a light or medium roast tend to name citrus or stone fruit over a brown sugar sweetness. Taken darker, the fruit steps back, the cup turns toward toasted nuts and cocoa, and the acidity softens without disappearing. That body is why a Huehuetenango holds up in espresso and under milk.
El Mirador, our family's farm
In 1987 Tomás Mireles left La Cumbre in Colombia, aged 28, with his wife Carmen, their daughter Elena, then eight, a sack of seed and a copy of his father's notebook that he had written out by hand over three nights. He found what he wanted in Huehuetenango, below the Cuchumatanes, on cold high slopes near the Mexican border that reminded him of home. He cut the terraces himself and named the farm El Mirador, the lookout. The first real harvest came in 1990, and Sofía was born there in 1991. Father and son wrote to each other every month for the rest of Aurelio's life, mostly about rain. El Mirador and the second mountain tells the whole story.
El Mirador sits at 1,700 meters and grows Bourbon and Caturra, washed. It is roasted dark for espresso and milk drinks, and no darker. Our dark roast from Guatemala has hints of toasted almond and brown sugar, with a little orange at the end.
