This delicious and approachable coffee comes to them from Antigua in Guatemala, offering up a relaxed milk chocolate sweetness, a toasted hazelnut warmth, and soft, defining hints of key lime pie.

If them were forced to pigeon-hole it, La Soledad would be filed under ‘Coffees that taste quite a lot like coffee’, with its buckets of brown sugar sweetness and a gentle toasty-ness making it exceedingly easy to get along with.

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La Soledad is a privately-held farm, owned by Lucia Zelaya and her husband, Rony Asensio. The farm is an 11-hectare carve-out of a much larger estate called Finca Santa Clara, which was established by Lucia’s great-grandfather in 1908 and subdivided between family members in the 1990’s.

Together with the manager of day-to-day operations and a team of twenty-five seasonal pickers, Lucia and Rony pay close attention to all aspects of the coffee’s journey, from shade-tree management through to careful picking of only the ripest cherries.

The result for them is an incredibly clean, elegant, and satisfying coffee which we’re really excited to share with you.
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This is their second season buying La Soledad here in Melbourne, though (while working at other companies) we’ve bought coffees from the Zelaya family as far back as 2013.

We’re roasting this coffee on the lighter end of the spectrum — what them call ‘filter coffee’ — to accentuate the sweetness and warmth that drew them to it. This means it’s best for brewing on pour over, plunger, batch brew, AeroPress, (or similar).