We’re excited to be working again with Gold Mountain Coffee Growers to bring you delicious coffee out of Nicaragua.

This coffee is absolutely perfect for the fall season: It has good body with an apple-like crispness and acidity, and the caramelized notes in the aroma remind us of a baked apple dessert.

We started working with Gold Mountain in 2017 after meeting founder Ben Weiner at the Specialty Coffee Association Expo in Seattle. (And we did our coffee shopping at their booth again this year!)

His company not only grows coffee on their its own farms but also works with a network of partner farmers to help them improve quality and sell to roasters like us. This specific coffee comes from that community of partner farmers in the Jinotega region and is named after our giveback partners in Nicaragua, Chain Collaborative and Planting Hope.

(The Chain Collaborative supports organizations in coffee-growing regions that are pushing for development led by locals. They have partnered with Planting Hope in Nicaragua since 2014.)

Sales from this coffee support Planting Home’s standing library in Matagalpa. Named the La Chispa (“The Spark”) after the neighborhood in the city of Matagalpa, the two-story library offers book loans, computer classes, art classes, dance classes, tai-kwon do and reading groups. It serves more than 1,800 students at five local schools, none of which have its own library. Planting Hope’s staff regularly visits these schools to introduce the library’s services, attends to students visiting the library and provides scholarships to students who want to supplement their studies or learn job skills through an internship.

While not in a coffee-growing community itself, many people in La Chispa work in Matagalpa’s dry mills processing coffee that is delivered by producers. “All of Nicaragua,” says Mercedes Guerrero Arista, the Country Director for Planting Hope, “depends on coffee.”

Last year, your purchase of coffee from Nicaragua enabled us to support a Planting Hope’s mobile library, which visited under-resourced schools to improve students' literacy, math and science skills. Our funding sent Planting Hope's most trained tutor to five different schools over four months and allowed them to reach 240 kids in all.

You can read more about our giveback program and how we support health care and education in coffee-growing countries here.

• Region: Jinotega
• Farms: Gold Mountain producers
• Varietal(s): Maragogype, Caturra, Pacamara, Maracaturra, Catuai, Bourbon
• Process: Washed
• Importer: Gold Mountain Coffee Growers

All Connect Roasters coffees are packaged in a heat-sealed, foil-lined bag equipped with a one-way degassing valve and zip-lock top, all of which help keep coffee fresher longer.