MORE ABOUT

THIS COFFEE

Max Pérez was raised on a coffee farm in Huehuetenango with a dream of eventually having his own coffee enterprise. He and his wife Claudia, trained to be lawyers and in 2010, they took the plunge into coffee farming with the purchase of Finca La Hermosa. They had been looking for land in Antigua but could not find anything within their price range. One day, while searching on the internet, Max found what is now Finca La Hermosa but on the day of signing, he discovered that the land was in Acatenango, not Antigua. The farm they purchased in 2010 was an abandoned 320-hectare coffee farm with very old Typica trees.

‘I was in love with Max but now I fell in love with the farm and the land’, is how Claudia describes their first few years at Finca La Hermosa, which provided lots of learning opportunities such as figuring out how to get water and electricity to the farm for processing. The first step for Max was to evaluate the soil and the existing trees and get the farm to be productive. And then to make the farm a successful business.

Max always wanted to have lots of different varieties. Starting in 2012, he began his travels to other coffee-growing regions to get different coffee varieties that might be successful in the sandy, volcanic soil of Finca La Hermosa. He looked at farms that had similar soil quality, temperature, rainfall etc. and purchased seeds from them. His travels have taken him all over the Americas in search of varieties- but the variety of this lot is Pache, a variety that was discovered in 1949 in Guatemala on the Brito farm in Santa Cruz Naranjo, Santa Rosa, about 74 miles down the Pan-American Highway from Finca La Hermosa. When Max found Pache, he first propagated the seedlings in his extensive nursery and now has the dwarf coffee plants growing through the productive 120 hectares of the 320-hectare farm.

Water is a major issue for the Pérez family. Finca La Hermosa gets about a third of the rainfall of other parts of Acatenango. Due to the lack of rainfall, and the lack of public works water, Max and Clauda built a mechanical well to bring irrigation to the fields and to bring water to the community that they live in. In areas of Guatemala where there is a lack of rainfall, water trucks come once or twice a week to deliver water to the remote communities. Oftentimes, this water is expensive and can be dirty, posing a health risk for the community. Max and Claudia believe that the root of keeping the 140 employees at Finca La Hermosa happy is to treat them as friends. A friend wouldn’t let a friend drink dirty water.

70% of the production at Finca La Hermosa is USDA-certified organic, Cafe Practices, and Rainforest Alliance certified. The farm has also won first place in Anacafe’s ‘Best in Guatemala’ Competition. The secret to their success is not such a secret- Max and Claudia are always seeking the best way, the most economical way and the best quality in everything related to coffee. The Pérez family demonstrates exemplary coffee production practices by planting beans alongside their coffee trees to aid in nitrogen-fixing, utilising on-site chicken manure and discarded fruit pulp from coffee processing for fertilisation, and treating their employees with the utmost respect.