Guatemala - Familia Primavera [25/26]

Brew Guide:

Best Brewed with: Omni, suitable for filter and sweet classic style espresso

Light-Medium Roaster Influence:
Roasted slightly slower and longer than we might typically take high altitude Huehues aim more towards brown sugar, lower acidity and comforting flavours, without tasting roast character. 

Best Rested: 2-3 weeks

For Filter: 95°C, 62g/L when fresh, when well rested you can go down to 91°C and 60g/L

For Espresso: 18g, 40g out, 32-34s trad style

We’re tasting: Sweet caramel, milk chocolate and dried apple aromatics. In the cup it's clean, sweet and buttery bodied- we find orchard fruits (pear & apple), almond butter and hazelnut crème, with a dense fudge sweetness. As it cools some black tea, dried peel & apple streusel cake notes come to the front. A nice comfort coffee easy-drinker. 

Traceability

The Story

Primavera Coffee was founded in 2013 by Nadine Rasch, a fourth-generation coffee producer whose family has been involved in Guatemalan coffee since 1880. The company now works with over 250 producers across Guatemala, operating through sister company La Central de Café which handles milling and export operations.

Guatemala's 25/26 harvest is on course to be the country's largest in three years, grower reinvestment from last season's historically elevated arabica prices showing through in healthy yields across the producing regions. This lot arrived in the UK in late March from early-harvest pickings in San Antonio Huista, ahead of the cold snap that pushed the remainder of the national harvest several weeks behind schedule.

When we set out to build our house filter range, we needed coffees that could deliver consistently excellent daily drinking while supporting meaningful change in coffee-growing regions. The 27-year highs in arabica futures that defined last year's buying season, and which kept Familia Primavera out of the house filter slot in 24/25, has seen some correction from the record highs - and that's seen this year's lot come in at a similar price point to the previous season, however with every other coffee on the offer now sitting at a higher cost to us in the roastery, and having worked to smooth our operation to support eating the margin on it - we're back to purchasing house filter volumes again, part of our mission to use this slot in our offer to support impact projects at origin.

With this lot, our export and import partner Primavera builds a larger volume field blend from outturns produced by smallholder farmers in the San Antonio Huista municipality of Huehuetenango.
These lots are either too small to represent reasonable microlot or bulk lot volume on their own, or not quite reaching the threshold for single origin release. Without a clear route to the speciality market, they may have been sold into commercial channels. By creating a larger field blend with careful selection of components, Primavera are able to craft an 84–85+ point lot that commands a speciality price and value return to the producer, gains access to multiple markets, and maintains speciality-level traceability throughout.

We're roasting these lots slower and marginally hotter at the end of the roast compared to our other range, aiming for peak caramels even with a lighter hand on the end result - what we're calling a comfort roast, if you will. We buy coffees for this "house filter" range looking not for super bright acidity or for wild complexity, but for comforting, familiar flavours with heaps of sweetness. This is a coffee that serves its intended purpose - accessible enough for any brewing method while supporting producers who are adapting to specialty coffee production in challenging circumstances. Whether you're using a batch brewer or French press (and yes, it works well with milk), you're getting a coffee that delivers both in the cup and at origin.