Latte Art from Franklin
Last Monday began with a tour of the city (14 zones) and walking through the central market, which consists of fruit and spices on one level, souvenirs on another and hand made crafts on the 3rd level. Quite an interesting city with much to offer. We happened to be staying at a hotel with a Coffee House connected. As we frequented this shop, we discovered the barista working, Franklin, was ranked in the top ten of 2008 Barista National Championship of Guatemala. We found this to be quite a chance meeting and wanted to share some of his story.
Steph and Franklin
Franklin uses coffee from Guatemala only, but we would love to experiment with coffees from all over the world. He prefers coffee from Antigua classified as SHB (strictly hard bean). One of the discoveries that we made is that the Agtron (level of roast color) of his coffee is 55 (cupping roast). He believes that coffees must be roasted as light as possible even for espresso shots.
In the National Barista Championship last year, he used a blend of Antigua (southwest of Guatemala City) and San Marcos (north central Guatemala) coffees. These two coffees combined, bring a crisp acidity and a nice floral aroma to the cup. The interesting thing about this is that these two coffees were blended together after being roasted.
Andres and Franklin
He also has a passion for latte art as shown in the pictures. We found that Franklin is doing something right, as his espresso had dark chocolate notes with hints of fruit. We are excited to experiment in the future with Franklin’s idea for espresso.
More to come from the Fincas…Enjoy!
Andres and Stephanie
