Antigua Coffee Tastings and Workshops

Every coffee morning here ends in a cup, and almost nobody explains what you are supposed to do with it. A tasting on a farm is not a coffee break. It is the last stage of the process you have just walked through, and it is what makes the rest of it make sense. Deciding which is the best coffee tour Antigua for you often comes down to this half hour.

What a farm tasting actually is

You will have watched the beans roasted, usually on a comal over a fire, and ground by hand in a mill somebody's grandmother probably used. The coffee is then brewed in front of you and poured, and the point is that you know exactly where every step of it came from. Most farms serve one properly made cup, sometimes two.

It is not a cupping in the professional sense — no flight of samples in numbered bowls — unless you ask for one in advance. What it is instead is the one cup of coffee in your life whose whole history you watched.

Anacafé's profile, and what it means in the cup

The national coffee association publishes a one-line cup profile for this region. Know it before you taste: elegant and well balanced with a rich aroma and very sweet taste. Read that as cocoa and toasted nut on the nose, a clean middle without much sharpness, and a sweetness that arrives late and stays.

Anacafé's cupping laboratory is the validating laboratory for the origin designation of Antigua coffee, and it revalidates the cup profile year by year. So that sentence is a standard somebody measures against every year, not marketing copy.

How to taste it, in five steps

1. Look at the grounds

The grind is coarser than you are used to, and even. Uneven grounds are why a home cup goes bitter.

2. Smell them dry

Nose in, breathe once. This is the fragrance, and on Antigua coffee it usually reads as cocoa and toasted nut before anything sweet arrives.

3. Pour, then break the crust

Hot water on the grounds, four minutes, then push the floating crust back with a spoon and smell again as it opens. This is the aroma, and it is a different thing from the fragrance.

4. Slurp it off the spoon

Loudly, and on purpose — it sprays the coffee across your palate instead of pouring it down the middle. The noise is the technique, not a joke.

5. Come back as it cools

Sweetness and acidity both read more clearly at drinking temperature than at boiling. Anacafé's own profile for this region is elegant and well balanced with a rich aroma and very sweet taste, and the sweetness is the part you will notice last.

Roasting on a comal and grinding by hand

The workshop part of a farm morning is the roast. A comal is a flat clay or metal griddle over a wood fire. The beans are turned on it by hand until the colour and the sound are right, and a roaster listens for the crack rather than watching a clock.

Then the mill, which is hand-cranked and slower than you expect. Green bean to poured cup takes about twenty minutes between the two. The smell in that room outlasts the cup.

What each tour's tasting includes

Taking beans home

Buy on the farm. It is the best price you will find for that coffee anywhere. The money goes to the person who grew it, and it was roasted days ago rather than months. Take quetzales in cash, because card machines on a smallholding are rare.

Ask for whole beans rather than ground if you can grind at home. Ask when it was roasted and which plot it came from; on a family farm the answer is usually a specific slope. One tour includes a bag in the fare, which is worth weighing against the fares on the visiting page.

A workshop or a walk — choosing

If the tasting is why you are going, take a morning that gives you two hours or more on the farm. Say so when you book, and ask for the hands-on part. If you want the walk and the view, with the cup as a bonus, the bicycle and ATV formats give you a longer ride and a shorter tasting.

Either way, what you are tasting was decided months earlier on the plots — the process page explains how, and Antigua Coffee Tours compares what each departure gives you.