Fernando's Kaffee

Fernando's Kaffee started, by the shop's own telling, with one man experimenting with roasting coffee beans in a popcorn popper around 1998. He opened the café itself in Antigua Guatemala in 2001, at a moment when the colonial city was becoming known internationally for the quality of coffee grown in its surrounding volcanic highlands. The chocolate side came from the same instinct for doing things from raw material up: Fernando began roasting cacao that same year, and in 2005 started making chocolate bean-to-bar, using cacao sourced exclusively from Guatemala rather than blending in imported beans. Fifteen-plus years of refining that chocolate process have gone into a program that now includes hands-on chocolate workshops for visitors, alongside the coffee roasting that started it all. The café has become, almost incidentally, a meeting point -- travelers and locals gathering over the smell of beans roasting on-site, a smell few Antigua cafés can claim comes from their own equipment rather than an outside supplier. Both products share the same premise: single-origin, produced start to finish under one roof, in a city where a great deal of coffee and cacao passes through on its way to being roasted somewhere else entirely. Fernando's keeps both processes local instead.