Tasting Notes: Coffee Cherry, Pear & Chocolate Truffle. Big, bursting, sweet cup.

When we first cupped this coffee at Portland SCA in April, 2023, it was already sold out for the year from our friends at Onyx Coffee Importers -- a flourishing outgrowth and extension of Edwin Martinez's generational family coffee farm and neighboring community farms now encompassing dozens of Huehuetenango, Guatemala community producers and families represented for export by Onyx.

It's a big sweet round cup, think Nutella and drinking chocolate with pear (apple and pear and hazelnut/almond notes are commonly pleasing tasting notes from Huehue grown coffees). We are very excited to bring this coffee to you this season and might even follow through on our threats to visit next March or April after a half-dozen years or more of working together with the great team at Onyx, meeting their families of producers when they've journeyed north, and delighting in a wide variety of coffees we cherish from the wild, difficult to access, and irascible northern Guatemalan coffee lands. Disfruta! -Kevin

From Onyx: The Story of the Two Associates

His warm and generous demeanor tells the story of a powerful kindness cultivated over a lifetime-- it's apparent in any photo, but meeting him is an experience. Don Concepción Villatoro is a gentle man synchronized to the rhythms of his farm, his family, and his faith.  Aptly, Concepción tells the origin story of his farm name, "The Two Associates" in the form of a parable on humility:

"A guy said, to an old man, 'The sign above your garden says there are two partners here but I only ever see you working here.' The old man told him, 'The other partner is the one up in the sky. He commands the rain, he commands everything else we need, I just work here to care for the plants.'"

On the high mountainside of El Chalum in La Libertad, the climate is mild, shielded from heat by mountain peaks and often by cloud cover. Don Concepción works closely with his son, cultivating Caturra and Bourbon varieties beneath Chalum and Gravilea shade trees. Meticulous pruning and care means the Villatoro's plants are verdant and thriving.