Nicaragua: Finca San Francisco Microlot
$20.00
Roast: Medium
Region: Jinotega
Farm: Finca San Francisco
Process: Washed
Altitude: 1,350-1,400m
Variety: Caturra Estrella, Catuai
Cup: Peanut Brittle, Frosted Corn Cereal, Raisin
Cupping Notes
Here’s another standout coffee from Nicaragua!
While we’ve featured some fantastic coffees from Nicaragua in years past, this is sure to be a new favorite of yours.
Here’s what we’re tasting:
Peanut Brittle. Whereas many Nicaraguan coffees tend to lead off with intense chocolate, this lovely coffee tends towards something else. We think this coffee provides a nice level of nuttiness that can be more common in coffee from Costa Rica, Guatemala, or Brazil. However, the sweet and silky body is king with this coffee. The salty peanut note is paired up with a caramely note and creaminess that reminded us of peanut brittle.
Frosted Corn Cereal. Playing further off the sweet and savory vibe this coffee is putting off, we arrived at frosted corn cereal. Few things provide more comfort than memories of those sugary childhood breakfasts. Sweet, salty cereal with cool milk.
Raisin. If we weren’t reminded of corn cereal already, this note would have had the alarms blaring. Raisin! Oh, the controversial raisin. Love them or hate them, these dried grapes are sweet, with deep and juicy fruitiness. They are a natural pairing to corn cereal and we think you’ll enjoy the pairing we found too.
Farming Notes
This year, we are pleased to have purchased 3 different coffees from our partners at-origin in Nicaragua, Gold Mountain Coffee Growers. Ben and his team in Nicaragua are leaders of the specialty coffee world when it comes to thorough traceability, ethical practices, and empowerment of the producers they work with.
Gold Mountain Coffee Growers is a social enterprise that works directly with coffee producers in Nicaragua to connect them with roasters abroad. GMCG is on the ground, all the time, teaming up with producers willing to take the steps necessary (and whose altitude and soil conditions allow them) to produce high-cupping specialty coffee. We literally stand on every partner farm during picking to ensure ripeness with refractometers and ripeness bracelets. GMCG also carries out sustainable development projects in communities, such as free computing classes for girls from coffee communities, medical assistance, microcredit, running water in schools, and educational supplies.
This first coffee from Nicaragua was produced thanks to the hard work of husband and wife duo Don Francisco and Blance Nieve, who live in the Jinotega Region.
Don Francisco and his wife Blanca Nieve live very high up in the mountains of Jinotega, Nicaragua. They produce exceptional quality coffee and leave a part of their farms in their natural, forest state to protect spring water that bubbles to the surface. They are at such a high altitude that their coffee is harvested a full two months after the rest of the country’s coffee due to the colder climate and increased cloud cover in their farms’ microclimate. The coffee beans’ slow maturity allows them to collect more nutrients, producing more complex cupping notes.
GMCG works especially hard with Don Francisco & Blanca Nieve to provide their family financing. They have significantly invested into expanding their production by improving their truck, so that they can cut down on the amount of time it takes to get coffee from the mountain down into the valley for sun-drying. It is truly a miracle that their vehicle makes it up the very steeply-inclined road to their farm. They have also installed and expanded electricity in their home, improved their roof and workers’ housing, improved their coffee processing equipment, infrastructure, and more.
Don Francisco & Blanca Nieve were some of the first farmers to join Gold Mountain Coffee Growers back in the day. Francisco and Nieve were members of a certified co-op that suffered from mismanagement and did not allow enough income to feed a family.
As Ben and Gold Mountain came in, they provided new market access and even financed the purchase of their second farm, Finca San Francisco.