Specialty Coffee Wiki

Finca El Injerto

Properties3
descriptionThe Aguirre family's estate in La Libertad, Huehuetenango — a farm founded in 1874 that has won Guatemala's Cup of Excellence and set the country's top auction prices with Pacamara and Geisha.
tagsorigin, farm, guatemala, huehuetenango, cup-of-excellence, geisha, pacamara
aliasesEl Injerto, El Injerto Farm, Finca El Injerto Guatemala, El Injerto I, El Injerto S.A.

9 min read

Finca El Injerto

Finca El Injerto is a family-owned coffee estate in La Libertad, Huehuetenango, in the northwestern highlands of Guatemala near the Mexican border. It has been in the Aguirre family since 1874, and it is the single most decorated name in Guatemalan specialty coffee: its lots have won the national Cup of Excellence outright and repeatedly taken the highest price of the auction.123

If you have seen a Guatemalan coffee on a menu with a variety name most people cannot pronounce and a price that made you blink, there is a good chance it came from here.

Where it is, and why that matters

The farm sits in Huehuetenango, the highest and most remote of Guatemala’s eight officially mapped growing regions — the one reached for when a buyer wants brightness and acidity rather than the rounder chocolate of Antigua. El Injerto’s own plantings run from 1,500 metres above sea level up to 1,920 m, with the most delicate varieties planted at the top.4 Higher means colder nights, slower-ripening cherries, and denser beans — the mechanism explained on Terroir.

The farm describes its ground as mineral-rich and non-volcanic, with average rainfall of 1,600 mm and an average temperature of 22 °C.4 Shade comes principally from Inga, the nitrogen-fixing tree used across Central America.5

To verify — how big the farm is, and how high it goes

Two basic numbers do not settle:

  • Area. The Alliance for Coffee Excellence farm-directory page for El Injerto gives 447 hectares in its narrative and 680 hectares in its data table — on the same page.5 The difference may be one section of the estate versus the whole property, but nothing consulted here says so. The farm’s own site gives no figure at all.4
  • Top altitude. The farm says 1,920 m;4 ACE writes “5,000–8,000 feet (1,500–2,000 metres)”, which is itself an inconsistent conversion — 8,000 ft is about 2,438 m.5 Treat 1,500–1,920 m as the farm’s own figure and everything above it as unreconciled.

To verify — volcanic or not

The farm calls its soil non-volcanic;4 ACE’s directory entry calls it “Loamy-Clay; volcanic, profound, well-drained with high organic matter content.”5 These directly contradict each other. The producer’s own description is the more likely one to trust, but the conflict is recorded rather than quietly resolved.

How it started

The first owner, Jesús Aguirre Panamá, acquired the land in 1874.54 He did not plant coffee. He planted sugarcane — for the crystallised brown-sugar loaves Guatemalans call panela — along with corn, beans and tobacco.54

Coffee arrived around 1900.54 The name came with it. The farm says injerto is the name of a fruit native to the area;4 ACE’s version of the same story translates it literally as “The Grafting”, on the grounds that this section is where agricultural development in the area began.5 Both readings are on the record, and the Spanish word carries both meanings.

The Aguirre family has worked the farm continuously since 1956, and it is now run by the third and fourth generations.4 ACE lists the registered owner as Arturo Aguirre Escobar / El Injerto, S.A.5

One thing the farm is emphatic about: it processes only its own fruit. “At El Injerto, we DO NOT buy coffee cherries or parchment from anyone else. We process only what we produce.”6 That is unusual — many estates of this size buy in cherry from neighbours — and it is the practical basis for the traceability its auction lots depend on.

What is planted

El Injerto lists a deliberately wide bench of varieties rather than one signature cultivar:4

VarietyNote
Bourbon (including Royal Bourbon)The heirloom backbone; sold as the farm’s creamy, chocolatey house coffee6
PacamaraThe oversized Salvadoran cross that won the farm its 2015 Cup of Excellence1
GeishaTwo separate lines — Geisha Panama and Geisha Malawi — and the variety behind its 2021 and 2022 auction results23
MaragogypeThe giant-bean Typica mutation, sold as “Giant Maragogype”6
CatuaíBoth Red Catuai and Catuai Amarelo (yellow)
SL28A Kenyan selection, unusual in Central America
MoccaA very small-bean heirloom

Processing on the farm covers washed and natural (dry) methods, plus its own dry mill and roasting operation.4 Running the mill in-house means the farm controls the coffee from cherry to export grade rather than handing it to a third party after fermentation.

To verify — the variety split and the 1956 production figure

Two numbers repeated in the research behind this note could not be confirmed at first hand:

  • A Taiwanese importer breaks the planting down as 70% Bourbon and 30% everything else across 245 hectares.7 No producer or ACE source gives any percentage. Treat it as one importer’s description.
  • The farm is widely said to have produced about 300 bags of parchment coffee in 1956, when Arturo Aguirre Escobar began working it.5 The figure appears in the research report attributed to both the farm site and ACE, but was not visible on either page when they were read here.

Competition record

This is what the farm is known for. Trade profiles routinely call El Injerto “a multiple Cup of Excellence winner” and the standard-bearer for Huehuetenango;8 the ACE tables bear that out. All three results below come from Alliance for Coffee Excellence results pages — the official record of the Cup of Excellence auctions.

YearRankLotVarietyScorePrice/lbBuyer
120151stEl Injerto IPacamara90.72$25.80Wataru & Co., Ltd. for Takamura Coffee Roasters1
220211st (1a / 1b)El Injerto IGeisha90.5153.10 / 50.301a: Orsir Coffee Co., Coffee-Tech.co.nz, BC Co. NZ, Vero Coffee House, Brulerie du Quai, Goodboy Bob, MQ Coffee · 1b: Shanghai Carmo Trading, Fisher Coffee, Manner Coffee, Eastern International2
320222nd (2a / 2b)El Injerto IGeisha91.33111.10 / 111.202a: Fisher Coffee, S.O.E Coffee and others · 2b: MUSEO Co., TXT Coffee, No Doubt3

The 2015 win is the cleanest single record: the winning lot was 2,136.91 lb, it took 25.80/lb**, and it returned **55,132.28 — the top price in an auction whose average was $9.15/lb.15 The farm was, in other words, worth nearly three times the field.

The 2021 and 2022 rows show what happened to those prices in six years. A first place in 2015 paid 25.80/lb. A *second place* in 2022 paid 111.20/lb — more than four times as much, for a coffee that did not win. That is the price inflation documented across Premiumisation and Cup of Excellence records by country, and it tracks the arrival of Geisha at the top of Central American auctions.

Splitting a winning coffee into two lots (1a/1b, 2a/2b) is standard Cup of Excellence practice — the same coffee, the same score, two separate bids, usually from two different buying consortia. The farm’s own site summarises these as “Best Coffee of Guatemala 2021” and “2nd Place in Cup of Excellence 2022”, which matches the ACE tables exactly.6

El Injerto’s best price still sits below Guatemala’s highest recorded Cup of Excellence figure — $143.10/lb, paid in 2025 for a washed Geisha from La Gran Manzana. The full country ledger is at Cup of Excellence records by country.

Buyers

The farm’s auction lots go where nearly all top Cup of Excellence lots go: East Asian roasters and importers, with a growing Taiwanese and Chinese share. The 2015 lot went to Wataru & Co. buying for Takamura Coffee Roasters in Japan;1 the 2021 and 2022 lots went to Taiwanese, New Zealand, Chinese, Korean and French groups.23 This is the same bidding cohort described on Green coffee auctions and Buying consortium.

Outside the auction system, the American roaster Stumptown Coffee Roasters buys El Injerto coffee on a long-standing direct relationship, and lists Guatemala El Injerto Bourbon among its core single origins — described as tasting of “orange sherbert and buttery chocolate.”9

To verify — the sustainability claims

Three claims about the farm come from a single roaster’s product page, which was unreachable (HTTP 429) when checked here, so they are reported rather than confirmed:9

  • that more than half of El Injerto’s land is protected forest, the largest such holding in Huehuetenango;
  • that in 2017 it became the first Guatemalan farm to obtain Carbon Neutral certification — no certifying body’s register was checked;
  • that Stumptown has bought its coffee since 2003. The Stumptown Coffee Roasters note carries a matching “twenty years” claim from Stumptown’s own video, so the two are consistent, but both trace to the same company.

How it tastes

Descriptions are buyers’, not the farm’s, and are subjective by nature:

  • Bourbon: creamy body, refined acidity, sweet chocolate notes (the farm’s own description of Royal Bourbon);6 “orange sherbert and buttery chocolate” (Stumptown Coffee Roasters).9
  • Pacamara: citric tangerine acidity with tropical fruit, sold as “Pandora Premium Pacamara”;6 a Taiwanese importer’s washed Pacamara adds ripe berry aromatics, soft acidity, caramel sweetness and a tea-like finish.7
  • Maragogype: an elegant, round, silky body.6

See Cupping and Coffee scoring for how these descriptions relate to the numbers above.

Footnotes

  1. Alliance for Coffee Excellence — Guatemala 2015 results and auction ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5

  2. Alliance for Coffee Excellence — Guatemala 2021 results and auction ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  3. Alliance for Coffee Excellence — Guatemala 2022 results and auction ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  4. Finca El Injerto — The Farm (official site) ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7 ↩8 ↩9 ↩10 ↩11 ↩12

  5. Alliance for Coffee Excellence — farm directory entry 90.72 (El Injerto I) ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7 ↩8 ↩9 ↩10 ↩11

  6. Finca El Injerto — official homepage ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7

  7. Finca El Injerto coffee farm — Black Gold (黑金咖啡), Taiwan

    ↩ ↩2

  8. Finca El Injerto — Premium Roast producer profile ↩

  9. Stumptown Coffee Roasters — Guatemala El Injerto Bourbon — cited via the research report; the page returned HTTP 429 when checked here ↩ ↩2 ↩3

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