Guatemala Organic Coban -El Tirol Estate

Sweet Maria's Coffee

Coban has everything going for it, except the rain. Ask anyone who has traveled in Guatemala about Coban, and superlatives about the lush cloud-forests and extraordinary wildlife will follor. But Coban is an incredibly rainy environment year-round, rain being a big problem for the patio-drying of coffee. Coffee also benefits from a dry season in the yearly cycle of growth for the coffee tree, and growing coffee in a wet environment takes more care, more pruining, and more knowledge to avoid fungi and plant disease. Coban coffees have historically been tainted in the processing, tinged with wild slightly moldy flavors. Furthermore, Coban is also a remote (and lush, and beautiful) area, remote in terms of transporting coffee to the port, far away from the capital Guatemala City. Great coffee can be ruined in so many ways, and I think that's what happens to carelessly-processed Cobans. El Tirol is something different. It's actually a pair of sister farms, El Tirol proper and Aurora, located in the Alta Verapaz department of Coban. The average altitude of the Alta Verapaz zone is 5000+ feet, and rainfall is 2,500 millimeters distributed evenly throughout the year. (That's 98.42 inches per year, Gringo!) El Tirol Estate processes all the coffee for both farms from start to finish. That means they control the quality of their coffee from start to finish without intervention; a good thing. The coffee must be mechanically dried (you just can't patio dry in Coban without ruining coffee). The cup... aromatically sweet, sweet spice, fruited (slightly winey fruit), lighter body (heavier as cup cools), and the fruited aromas follow through in the cup flavors. There's good intensity in the finish, a lot of "follow through" on the palate which shifts from sweet fruit to milk chocolate, with a hint of pleasant smokiness in the finish. It's hard for me to pin down the fruit; in one cupping is was like the cherry of the coffee tree itself, and next time it was Fruit Loopy (not artificial-tasting though!), a combination of tropical fruit. There's a more pungent, bitter chocolate to the cup which develops around Full City+ roast stage if you prefer a darker roast "interpretation" and a good "rounded" cup profile in the dark stages too. I cupped this against four other Organic Guatemalas in the same offering (La Laguna, Bella Cruz, Nueva Armenia, as well as 2 from San Marcos area) and it came out as the strong front runner.

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