Cinco de Junio

We first tasted coffee from Cinco de Junio in 2009, when a graduate student working with the Fabretto Children’s Foundation sent us an unexpectedly delicious sample from one of the producers in the co-op. That producer's coffee would go on to take second place in the 2010 Cup of Excellence Nicaragua! We visited Las Sabanas for the first time in October of that year and have worked closely with the leadership of the co-op ever since.

During the 2012–2013 harvest season, a combination of factors led to the outbreak of a fungus called Coffee Leaf Rust (CLR) that devastated farms throughout Central America. The producers of the Cinco de Junio cooperative were hit hard, with both their yields and quality plummeting. We continued to support the cooperative, with all of the coffee we purchased going into year-round products such as Big Trouble, Forty Six, and Fast Forward. In addition, Cinco de Junio initiated multiple projects funded by our Seeds grant program to help its members upgrade their farms and wet mills. Year after year, the co-op has maximized the scant resources available to them, never losing sight of their desire to produce some of the highest quality, organically grown coffee in the country. 

Since the 2018-2019 harvest season, Cinco de Junio has employed a talented cupper to taste members' coffee deliveries to the cooperative. This enables individualized feedback to each member and combining deliveries into larger lots depending on cup quality. This type of support has been a game changer for the co-op. In recent years, we’ve tasted some of the best coffees from the group since the CLR crisis hit. We're thrilled to see their persistence and hard work pay off, resulting in the return of a coffee that has historically been a staple of our Single-Origin lineup.