Source Analysis by Charlie Habegger
After more than 20 years of iteration, the name “Bella Carmona” represents more than a regional blend; it represents Beneficio Bella Vista’s entire portfolio of Antigua valley coffees, grown and selected from within the 18 estates managed by their team. Each year we buy as much volume of Bella Carmona as we can get our hands on (it’s never enough), along with a few microlots. These smaller lots are typically fully washed with traceability to a single smallholder community up the volcano, perhaps, or a single regenerative project on one valley estate. They are always outstanding and tend to be indicative of the larger lots. But there are others, like this one, that are about as far away from our expectations as an Antigua coffee can be.
"Gesha 56” is a cultivar selection from Malawi. Yes, Malawi, one of the southeasternmost African coffee origins. Gesha 56 supposedly has genetic links to the same Ethiopian landrace strain that begat today’s Panamanian Gesha, but is a different stature and cup altogether. The Bella Vista team had a great time experimenting with this one, clearly. Produced in Antigua and processed as a natural, it’s positively sumptuous. We get macerated strawberries, fresh Belgian waffles with honey, and Neapolitan ice cream. The cup is pronounced and fruity but also structured with a long, clean finish. It’s a big, bold swerve that lands beautifully. Just when we thought Bella Carmona coffees couldn’t get any better.
The city of Antigua is in many ways a modern coffee Eden. It’s iconic, laid back, gorgeously ornate, and for a city of its size it is absolutely teeming with historic coffee infrastructure. It also was the center of Guatemala’s specialty universe for many years. Prior to other departments in Guatemala having their own name recognition, coffees from all over the country were regularly transited to Antigua mills and exported as “Antigua” coffee, simply because its reputation was so strong. (Some departments, like Quiché, continue to have strong cherry pipelines to Antigua and struggle for their own name recognition in the market.)
The Antigua valley itself is a gifted area for coffee: it’s accessible and flat, highly volcanic, and older farms remain planted with majority bourbon-based genetics under very precisely managed shade canopy. The best washed coffees of the valley are decadent with butterscotch or marzipan-like sweetness, and brightness ranging from piquant lemonade to dessert wine or tangy dried fruit.
Most of Guatemala’s best centralized wet mills and boutique exporters are based in and around Antigua. There are hundreds of farms in the greater area, from the city’s legacy estates to patchwork smallholder communities climbing most of the way up the dramatic Volcán de Agua, one of three looming stratovolcanoes that seem to be visible from every street corner in town and play a large part in Antigua’s famous soil composition. Such a variety of producers beget coffees with endless combinations of microclimates, elevations and varieties. There is a lot to work with here, and a lot of talent.
“LPZ” and the Bella Vista Mill
Luis Pedro Zelaya (LPZ) is a fourth-generation producer and miller who for the past 20 years has established one of the best quality reputations in the country. Originally an employee of Bella Vista, he now runs the entire combination wet and dry mill in Antigua. Bella Vista services the coffee produced from LPZ’s own family estates and numerous other legacy farms which he manages via a unique profit-sharing agreement with the owners. Many of these farms are among the oldest in the country.
Bella Vista also processes coffee from hundreds of smallholders across the greater Antigua area, most notably along the slopes of Volcán de Agua, whose blend is sold as “Hunapú”, after the local indigenous title of the volcano. As a result of relentless perfectionism from harvest management to dry-milling and customer service, the brands designed and produced by LPZ and his quality team, particularly Bella Carmona and Hunapú, are some of the best-recognized Central American coffees in the specialty world.
What the Bella Vista team understands about Gesha 56 is that it is a distant cousin to Panama’s famously floral Gesha cultivar, which was first discovered not in Africa but in Panama, around 2003. Gesha 56, on the other hand, descends from an Ethiopian landrace transited at some point down Africa’s eastern coffee corridor to Malawi, where it was selected over time as much for its disease resistance as for its quality. Malawi’s modern coffee production is limited, but as a tiny economy, even for East Africa, its industry is widely shaped by the prohibitive cost of fertilizer and pesticides relative to farmers’ incomes. In other words, any decent cultivar that can grow disease-free on its own is going to be kept around. (This is not unique to Malawi of course, much of the world’s organic coffee is now made up of Catimor hybrids; what is unique is that Geshas’ disease resistance is often overlooked.)
Unlike the elongated Panama Gesha, Gesha 56, or “Malawi” has a shorter, denser stature and more rounded seeds. It’s known for resistance to both coffee leaf rust and fusarium bark disease, although for the Bella Vista team, its whispered-about cup quality was the real motivation.
For this natural process, the Malawi cherries are first hand-sorted and then sorted again using a water siphon system (a deep well that sucks the dense cherries down) to separate higher density fruit. The coffee is then slowly dried on raised beds for approximately 15–25 days, depending on weather conditions and drying environment. This controlled process helps preserve clarity, sweetness, and the elegant floral character of the variety while enhancing fruit complexity and cup structure. After resting in Bella Vista’s warehouses, the coffee undergoes a meticulous dry milling process: the parchment is removed, and the green coffee is carefully sorted by density, size, and weight. Finally, an electronic color sorter removes any visual defects, ensuring only the highest quality beans are selected.
