Finca La Bella

La Bella is in the south of the Sierra de las Minas Mountain range in eastern Guatemala. This is a beautiful part of Guatemala with most of the Sierra de Las Minas designated as a national park with biosphere status. Teodoro Engelhardt is the fourth generation of his family to grow coffee at La Bella and over the many years the farm has been added to and developed to over 85 acres of forest and coffee. The practices on the farm reflect the care that the wider community has for the area: water is conserved and recycled, the coffee trees are shaded under two levels of canopy to help preserve the wildlife diversity, and all coffee pulp (the fruit of the cherry that is removed during processing) is collected and turned into nutrient-rich soil by the farm's wormery which is then used in the coffee nursery beds. Over the last few years La Bella has been recovering from the persistent rains and low temperatures of 2020. Although this is some almost four years ago now, this kind of extreme weather can have a large impact on future crops and the farm is only now getting back to normal in terms of production quantity. Teodoro has also been experimenting with his processing techniques. For his smaller lots, Teodoro has been trying multiple-stage fermentation, which has given some interesting flavour profiles. In comparison to his Traditional Washed Process, where the coffee is pre-fermented for two days before pulped. As the production has gotten a little larger, another dryer has been installed, and more camas africanas. These are raised platforms on which to dry coffee, named for their predominant use in Kenya, Ethiopia, and Rwanda. Usually in Central America, coffee is dried on concrete patios, but as La Bella has cool temperatures, and high humidity, the coffee benefits from the increased airflow of the raised beds.