It has been a busy end of 2009. I love beginnings and 2010 is promising. I am sure it will bring us opportunities to make it a better year.

I started the year drinking Antigua coffee. The colonial style city of Antigua is the perfect fusion between the Spanish and the Indigenous heritages. Down the road to Antigua, every colonial house has a summer plant called "buganbilia" (from Bougainvillea gender) to welcome you with red, fuchsia and yellow colors. Just before your eyes get lost in the horizon, three magnificent volcanoes remind you of its limits, enclosing this beautiful valley named "Panchoy". After a terrible eruption of the Agua volcano, around 1541, the city moved from Ciudad Vieja town to Panchoy, where Antigua is still located.

Coffee was first brought to Antigua as ornamental plants for the monasteries and churches. After mid 1800, the product became an agricultural alternative to cochineal and indigo, substituted by the artificial dye industry. In Antigua, the main plantations used to grow sugar cane and thus, it was very easy to adapt the infrastructure for coffee.

Farms in Antigua still maintain the colonial style established by the Spanish conquerors: the main house, the church and the portal for trading other goods within the people living in the farm.  As all these traditions, new generations have also inherited the same passion of their ancestors:  coffee is the product.  Their lives... their memories...their knowledge and... their reason to survive. 

Antigua coffee has grown with all this values and it has passed to tourists and coffee lovers around the world.  A very elegant and subtle cup; very well balanced; very sweet; with a light acidity but perfectly balanced with a round medium body and a lingering aftertaste.

Enjoy one of the finest coffees from Guatemala.

Antigua Coffee Scene - Photo by Antonio Arreaga