Nicaragua | El Porvenir

El Porvenir is Nicolas and Angela's farm in the mountains of Jinotega, Nicaragua, where the two of them work the harvest side by side and keep farming so they can support their family's education, in a family that now counts twelve grandchildren. Jinotega sits in the north-central highlands, and with Matagalpa and Nueva Segovia it is one of the country's main coffee regions, where coffee spread north from the farms around Managua in the 19th century and is still Nicaragua's most important crop.

Nicolas and Angela are members of Gold Mountain Coffee Growers, a direct trade farming group we have worked with for a few years. Gold Mountain does its own exporting and importing, so the coffee comes to us from the people who grew it without anyone in between, and runs much of its processing and farmer support out of its flagship farm, Finca Idealista. During picking, a ripeness team checks pickers' baskets with refractometers, and every lot is sorted again and again, on the drying beds, by machine, under UV light, and by hand. Gold Mountain also makes zero- and low-interest loans to its farmers, has brought running water, school libraries, and electricity to coffee communities, and bought a rainforest next to Finca Idealista just to protect it.

This nanolot is 100% Red Catuai, a compact, high-yielding cross of Mundo Novo and Caturra that was developed in Brazil and is now planted all across Central America, grown at 1,450 meters. For the natural process the ripest cherries are sorted, carried down the mountain whole in ventilated boxes, and laid out on raised beds to dry in the sun for about a month, turned constantly so they dry evenly, which lets the sugars and flavor of the fruit work their way into the seed. Gold Mountain picked this natural out for its fruit and for a floral, lilac-like finish, and that is what we find in the cup of the Nicaragua El Porvenir Natural.

Whole bean.