Guatemala Lucia Solis

Region: Antigua, Guatemala

Farm: Rueda Specialty Coffee Farms

Elevation Grown: 1500MASL

Variety: Caturra & H1

Process: Luxia Washed Process

Tastes like: Caramel Cookie, Root Beer, Dessert Wine, Apples

Lucia Solis has spent years working with producers to refine their fermentation techniques, helping them make coffee more consistent and resilient in the face of unpredictable growing conditions. This year, she took things a step further.

The Luxia Washed lot comes from Rueda Specialty Coffee Farms in Antigua, Guatemala, and it’s not just one coffee, it’s a blend of 18 different day lots harvested from December 2023 to March 2024. The reason? The 2023-24 harvest in Antigua was all over the place. Unusual weather patterns led to uneven ripening, making it hard to isolate those perfect, peak-ripeness cherries that producers usually highlight. Instead of selecting only the best lots and leaving the rest behind, Lucia’s approach was to use yeast fermentation to stabilize and unify the entire harvest.

It’s a 48-hour submerged fermentation with Saccharomyces yeast, designed not to change the coffee’s flavor but to expand the window of what could be included as specialty. This means that under and overripe cherries, which would usually be sorted out, were able to be processed in a way that maintained quality and balance. The result is a classic, structured coffee with medium body and a crisp acidity. Something that holds up no matter which part of the harvest it came from.

Beyond the cup, this coffee also funds Fermentation Training Camps in Guatemala, where Lucia teaches producers how to use microbiology to create more stability in their coffees. It’s a way to make real knowledge accessible to the people most impacted by climate change and unpredictable growing conditions.

Lucia isn’t trying to become a producer, but she is helping push coffee forward in a way that makes sense for farmers. This coffee is proof of that.