Sandhill Coffee Community: Gold Mountain Coffee Growers
This blog is one in a series introducing you to the farms, folks, and friends who make up the Sandhill Coffee Community.
- Erica Zazo -
As a sustainability-focused coffee company, we think of our impact – both social and environmental – at every step of the coffee-making process.
From sourcing beans from environmentally-conscious growers, to serving our brewed coffee in compostable cups, to supporting 1% for the Planet with every bag sold – we take pride in our sustainable approach from start to finish.
This is why we’re excited to introduce you to Gold Mountain Coffee Growers, one Sandhill’s coffee partners located in Nicaragua. We work with them to source beans to roast for our Jose Francisco (single-origin) and Dark Side of the Loon (blend) coffees.
Specifically, the beans for our Jose Francisco roast come from a small farm in the Jinotega region of Nicaragua operated by Jose Francisco himself and his wife, Emma. His coffee trees are mixed in among cilantro, carrots, and other vegetables at the farm, and due to the high elevation there, Jose’s coffee takes longer to mature and results in a special flavor – making it worth the wait.
About Gold Mountain Coffee Growers
Gold Mountain Coffee Growers is a direct-trade coffee company that connects local farmers with coffee roasters around the world. Gold Mountain Coffee Growers operates its own coffee farm, Finca Idealista, in Matagalpa, Nicaragua. All coffee is exported in and out of the country by Gold Mountain themselves, shipping to roasteries across the world from its North American warehouse in Washington, D.C.
The company’s commitment to precision, accuracy, and attention to detail – every step of the coffee growing and harvesting process – is a testament to its mission of building and maintaining a social enterprise producing the highest-quality cup of coffee possible.
Farm partners (local growers) in the Gold Mountain Coffee network operate like a fine wine vineyard – from consistently testing for ripeness with refractometers to supervising pickers’ baskets to monitoring plant, fruit, and bean quality every step of the way.
The result: an excellent, high-cupping coffee every time.
Q&A with Ben Weiner, Founder of Gold Mountain Coffee Growers
Ben shares more about Gold Mountain Coffee Growers, what makes his company and partners’ coffee unique, and the importance of sustainability across all of its community-operated farms.
Tell us about Gold Mountain Coffee Growers – and the origin story of your coffee business.
Gold Mountain Coffee Growers is a group of farmers in Nicaragua, who handle their own exporting and importing, with the goal of fighting poverty through coffee quality.
It all started when I was the one American in a fair trade co-op in Nicaragua who bought a small coffee farm. All of the members of the co-op started coming to me and saying, “Can you help connect us with roasters because we can't support our families based on these fair trade prices, that are supposedly fair?” There were clear issues with corruption, the minimum price being too low, and not enough support for production costs, so I decided to organize Gold Mountain Coffee Growers into a group of farmers that could do our own exporting, importing, and connecting with roasters to make a positive impact through high-cupping coffee.
Through the years, our business has grown due to more farmers wanting to access all the benefits that come with working more directly with roasters. We have a huge focus on quality control and maintaining relationships, and working in a challenging environment, all to do something very incredible through coffee.
How did your partnership with Sandhill Coffee begin – and why are partnerships with local coffee roasters important to your brand?
We started working with Sandhill Coffee through word-of-mouth and we highly value roasters that understand all of the work that goes into each coffee at origin (in our case, Nicaragua).
There is so much involved in bringing every pound of coffee to Sandhill and to roasters in general – from growing for years before there’s any harvest at all, to picking, de-pulping, fermenting, washing, sorting, drying, packing, importing/exporting, [and more]. That’s really just the tip of the iceberg of work that goes into each coffee.
So, we really appreciate roasters like Phil at Sandhill who are carrying coffees that have such a big set of positive social and environmental impacts.
What does producing sustainable coffee look like – and mean – to you?
For us, sustainability is about both the social and environmental side of everything involved in producing specialty coffee. For farmers and community, and most importantly local communities, it involves not just farmers, but also pickers, sorters, washers, supervisory staff, and everybody, making a dignified level of income – and being able to reinvest that wealth into their families and crops. On the environmental side, we work very hard to have as little to no negative environmental impact as possible.
What that means in practice is: We bought a rain forest just to protect it; On our flagship farm we use a mushroom to attack coffee borer beetle instead of using pesticides; We use machetes instead of herbicides to control weeds; We leverage rainwater catchment systems at a lot of our farms at Gold Mountain to use water from rain instead of having to take it from streams; And, we use special filters to filter water after it's used for washing coffee so that it doesn't have a negative effect on the watershed. Those are just some of the efforts we do – there are just so many.
Where do Gold Mountain Coffee Growers’ beans come from?
Gold Mountain Coffee Growers operates its own flagship farm, called Finca Idealista, and also supports a group of farming families who own and operate their own farms. That includes coffee farms like Jose and Emma’s farm, which is on a mountainside with a beautiful view of the valley below. There they're very much at the mercy of nature, farming as best they can, against or with the elements depending on what the weather is doing.
We support and provide farmers, like Jose Francisco and Emma, with the materials and resources they need to successfully run their businesses so they can do things like rebuild washing channels, build raised beds for partially-drying coffee on their farms, and access loans to be able to finance their crops each year.
What makes Sandhills’ Jose Francisco coffee unique?
Jose Francisco and Emma’s coffee beans have a wonderful floral blueberry and plum body. It is a variety called Caturra Estrella, which is a somewhat rare type of Caturra, that, I think, is more floral and tastes even better than other Caturra, which is already a great variety.
Sandhill Coffee Community: Gold Mountain Coffee Growers
This blog is one in a series introducing you to the farms, folks, and friends who make up the Sandhill Coffee Community.
–––
As a sustainability-focused coffee company, we think of our impact – both social and environmental – at every step of the coffee-making process.
From sourcing beans from environmentally-conscious growers, to serving our brewed coffee in compostable cups, to supporting 1% for the Planet with every bag sold – we take pride in our sustainable approach from start to finish.
This is why we’re excited to introduce you to Gold Mountain Coffee Growers, one Sandhill’s coffee partners located in Nicaragua. We work with them to source beans to roast for our Jose Francisco (single-origin) and Dark Side of the Loon (blend) coffees.
Specifically, the beans for our Jose Francisco roast come from a small farm in the Jinotega region of Nicaragua operated by Jose Francisco himself and his wife, Emma. His coffee trees are mixed in among cilantro, carrots, and other vegetables at the farm, and due to the high elevation there, Jose’s coffee takes longer to mature and results in a special flavor – making it worth the wait.
About Gold Mountain Coffee Growers
Gold Mountain Coffee Growers is a direct-trade coffee company that connects local farmers with coffee roasters around the world. Gold Mountain Coffee Growers operates its own coffee farm, Finca Idealista, in Matagalpa, Nicaragua. All coffee is exported in and out of the country by Gold Mountain themselves, shipping to roasteries across the world from its North American warehouse in Washington, D.C.
The company’s commitment to precision, accuracy, and attention to detail – every step of the coffee growing and harvesting process – is a testament to its mission of building and maintaining a social enterprise producing the highest-quality cup of coffee possible.
Farm partners (local growers) in the Gold Mountain Coffee network operate like a fine wine vineyard – from consistently testing for ripeness with refractometers to supervising pickers’ baskets to monitoring plant, fruit, and bean quality every step of the way.
The result: an excellent, high-cupping coffee every time.
Q&A with Ben Weiner, Founder of Gold Mountain Coffee Growers
Ben shares more about Gold Mountain Coffee Growers, what makes his company and partners’ coffee unique, and the importance of sustainability across all of its community-operated farms.
Tell us about Gold Mountain Coffee Growers – and the origin story of your coffee business.
Gold Mountain Coffee Growers is a group of farmers in Nicaragua, who handle their own exporting and importing, with the goal of fighting poverty through coffee quality.
It all started when I was the one American in a fair trade co-op in Nicaragua who bought a small coffee farm. All of the members of the co-op started coming to me and saying, “Can you help connect us with roasters because we can't support our families based on these fair trade prices, that are supposedly fair?” There were clear issues with corruption, the minimum price being too low, and not enough support for production costs, so I decided to organize Gold Mountain Coffee Growers into a group of farmers that could do our own exporting, importing, and connecting with roasters to make a positive impact through high-cupping coffee.
Through the years, our business has grown due to more farmers wanting to access all the benefits that come with working more directly with roasters. We have a huge focus on quality control and maintaining relationships, and working in a challenging environment, all to do something very incredible through coffee.
How did your partnership with Sandhill Coffee begin – and why are partnerships with local coffee roasters important to your brand?
We started working with Sandhill Coffee through word-of-mouth and we highly value roasters that understand all of the work that goes into each coffee at origin (in our case, Nicaragua).
There is so much involved in bringing every pound of coffee to Sandhill and to roasters in general – from growing for years before there’s any harvest at all, to picking, de-pulping, fermenting, washing, sorting, drying, packing, importing/exporting, [and more]. That’s really just the tip of the iceberg of work that goes into each coffee.
So, we really appreciate roasters like Phil at Sandhill who are carrying coffees that have such a big set of positive social and environmental impacts.
What does producing sustainable coffee look like – and mean – to you?
For us, sustainability is about both the social and environmental side of everything involved in producing specialty coffee. For farmers and community, and most importantly local communities, it involves not just farmers, but also pickers, sorters, washers, supervisory staff, and everybody, making a dignified level of income – and being able to reinvest that wealth into their families and crops. On the environmental side, we work very hard to have as little to no negative environmental impact as possible.
What that means in practice is: We bought a rain forest just to protect it; On our flagship farm we use a mushroom to attack coffee borer beetle instead of using pesticides; We use machetes instead of herbicides to control weeds; We leverage rainwater catchment systems at a lot of our farms at Gold Mountain to use water from rain instead of having to take it from streams; And, we use special filters to filter water after it's used for washing coffee so that it doesn't have a negative effect on the watershed. Those are just some of the efforts we do – there are just so many.
Where do Gold Mountain Coffee Growers’ beans come from?
Gold Mountain Coffee Growers operates its own flagship farm, called Finca Idealista, and also supports a group of farming families who own and operate their own farms. That includes coffee farms like Jose and Emma’s farm, which is on a mountainside with a beautiful view of the valley below. There they're very much at the mercy of nature, farming as best they can, against or with the elements depending on what the weather is doing.
We support and provide farmers, like Jose Francisco and Emma, with the materials and resources they need to successfully run their businesses so they can do things like rebuild washing channels, build raised beds for partially-drying coffee on their farms, and access loans to be able to finance their crops each year.
What makes Sandhills’ Jose Francisco coffee unique?
Jose Francisco and Emma’s coffee beans have a wonderful floral blueberry and plum body. It is a variety called Caturra Estrella, which is a somewhat rare type of Caturra, that, I think, is more floral and tastes even better than other Caturra, which is already a great variety.
Their coffee is really special and they put so much effort into it. For example, they have to carry the coffee up the mountain using a donkey because the road that goes to their farm is extremely steep and challenging. When you go and visit, it's a hike down and back up to get to where they are. They do an incredible job and they put so much effort into their coffee every year – it’s amazing.
Connect with Gold Mountain Coffee Growers online:
Website: www.goldmountaincoffeegrowers.com
Facebook: www.facebook.com/goldmtncoffee
Instagram: @goldmtncoffee
Twitter: @goldmtncoffee
Their coffee is really special and they put so much effort into it. For example, they have to carry the coffee up the mountain using a donkey because the road that goes to their farm is extremely steep and challenging. When you go and visit, it's a hike down and back up to get to where they are. They do an incredible job and they put so much effort into their coffee every year – it’s amazing.
Connect with Gold Mountain Coffee Growers online:
Website: www.goldmountaincoffeegrowers.com
Facebook: www.facebook.com/goldmtncoffee
Instagram: @goldmtncoffee
Twitter: @goldmtncoffee
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