Our Story
Hello! We are Pablo and Eva, founders of Quality Coffees. We are from different countries (Pablo – Guatemala, Eva – Lithuania). We met when we crossed paths on an island of Sweden, where we studied business at the same University. Now we are married and work full time in the specialty coffee industry.
The passion for coffee goes back to Pablo’s early childhood. Following his family’s footsteps, Pablo is the fourth-generation coffee producer. Pablo’s great grandfather Eusebio bought the farm in Guatemala in 1918, over a hundred years ago. Before Eusebio started cultivating coffee, he used to transport corn from one town to the other. As his business grew, he bought the land close to the small town of Santa Elena Barillas. He decided to transform this land into a coffee farm. As to these days, we still preserve some of his first bourbon trees in the farm.
For decades it was an incredibly good business to grow coffee in Guatemala, but since the prices of coffee fell drastically most farmers in our region have been struggling to keep their business going. Many farmers started to remove their coffee plantation and instead focus on cultivating avocado and other crops. Growing up Pablo saw his family struggling to keep the coffee business profitable and many people were telling him that it is a bad idea to get involved in this industry. When Pablo moved to Europe to study, he realized that there were many producers from Guatemala selling their coffee to roasters abroad and that coffee from Guatemala is very appreciated around the world. He understood that there is a hope to pursue his passion in the coffee industry and started having new ideas of how to make this business successful. He knew that changes must be made in the farm to be able to move forward. As Pablo was always focused on quality rather than quantity he decided to experiment and improve the quality by processing coffee in a different way than most of the producers in the region are used to. We believed that there are many people looking for specialty coffee, so we risked and invested all our savings to improve the infrastructure in the farm in order to achieve the results we wanted.
Now you might be wondering, but what is specialty coffee? It has strict new quality controls that make sure only the best beans will be processed. This type of coffee usually has little to no defects, with a score of 80 or above in 100-point scale. We harvest the coffee from a particular plot of land and process it in a separate way from the rest of the coffee from the farm. It has a different taste in the cup than the regular coffee as there has been investigative and experimental input to produce a coffee with these special characteristics. We believe that it is important to not only produce high quality coffee but also to let people know where each bean of their coffee comes from. That is why we are happy to give this opportunity for people to buy the coffee directly from the producer and learn how this coffee was made. We want to be honest and show how much passion and dedication is needed to produce high quality coffee.
If you have any questions, contact us at info@qualitycoffees.com. We’re happy to answer.
Pablo and Eva