FIRSTLIGHT 2024 - Silver Medal Winner
FIRSTLIGHT 2024 - Silver Medal Winner
It’s almost as if these two coffees were destined to come together. Our 2024 Firstlight Seasonal Blend is a union that centuries of conflict between the indigenous Mayans and colonists have thwarted. We have ignored the disputed border and blended a very special Mexican Chiapas and an exceptional Guatemalan Wuj Kape coffee and created a summer blend no one dared to imagine.
Origin | Guatemala, Mexico
Roasters Notes | An elegantly, balanced coffee with fresh fruit notes and a malty smooth finish.
Winner GoldenBean Australasia Awards 2024 - Silver Medal.
From the Cloud Forests of Chiapas
The isolated Chiapas highlands were annexed from Guatemala by the Mexicans in 1821. Chiapas straddles a unique geoform called the Pacific Slope, a west facing mountainous area, where some of the world’s best organic coffees grow alongside one of the rarest, largest and most bio-diverse ‘cloud-forest’ reserves, known as El Triunfo. This huge tropical corridor starts at 1200 meters above sea level, the very ceiling at which our coffee is grown. A select group of smallholder farmers grow a Catimor varietal coffee, under the forest’s canopy in the Sierra Mountain’s rich volcanic soils. Once the full ripened cherries are harvested the beans are fully washed, then sundried. This growing and processing adheres to strict organic farming practices, to yield a coffee of international repute. A coffee the locals refer to as “Café de Altura”, the coffee from on high.
This high grown Chiapas coffee gives our Summer Blend a fruity freshness and underlying notes of chocolate.
A woman’s nurturing touch
The Sierra’s forest cloaked slopes march out of Chiapas, ignoring man made borders and spill into Guatemala, where Caturra and Sarchimor varietals are grown at even loftier heights between 1200 and 1600 meters above sea level. Here the clay, mineral-rich loam of the Western Highlands delivers coffees every bit as remarkable as the partnering Mexican Chiapas.
Eighteen Huehuetenango smallholder farms (known as the Wuj Kape lot), are owned and operated exclusively by women. All these farmers are members of the International Women’s Coffee Alliance supported and mentored by the highly reputed Vides58 Coffee group.
