Guayusa-Coffee - Guayusa Tea with coffee – new variety
Introduction
This article offers a glimpse into how we work at GUYA and how that leads to exciting new projects. Everything at GUYA has grown—and continues to grow—out of personal interest, conviction and a heartfelt wish to put something good into the world.
If you’re interested in our new product, “Guayusa-Coffee”, or simply wondering why GUYA, a guayusa company, is suddenly launching a coffee product, you’ll find the answer here.
If you’re mainly curious about the taste and effects, you’ll find answers in our article “Tea with a coffee flavour”.
Contents
- How it all began
- Ecuador: finding the best coffee growers
- Tasting & development
- Sourcing & export
- Challenges
1. How it all began
Who would have thought that a guayusa company like ours would one day offer a coffee product?
We certainly didn’t expect it, and it took some persuading. As passionate guayusa advocates, we hardly drink coffee—unless it’s for the pleasure of it and the right atmosphere.
Taste has always been one of the main reasons coffee lovers have been reluctant to switch to guayusa. And then there’s Maik, our photographer and videographer, who is a big coffee fan. While we were in Ecuador from November 2019 to May 2020, filming terabytes of photo and video footage, we kept coming across coffee trees in the permaculture gardens of the Kichwa people.
After a few weeks, Maik began mixing guayusa powder with ground coffee to bring together the effects of both plants: the quick, strong lift of coffee and the longer-lasting, focusing effect of guayusa. Find out more about the combination in our article “Tea with coffee: a healthy pick-me-up”.
We tried different ratios and grew more and more enthusiastic: the effect was great, and the taste definitely won over coffee lovers. To get feedback, we shared our blend with people we knew loved coffee and also visited two baristas, including five-time Barista Championship winner David Mino. Together, we refined the blend and settled on a coffee grind that works best in a moka pot, French press and dripper.
2. Ecuador: finding the best coffee growers
As with our LEMONGRASS blend, our goal is to source as many raw ingredients as possible from Ecuador and our partner community. However, our partner community for guayusa and lemongrass has no experience growing coffee, let alone processing and roasting it.
So we called around Ecuador to find a suitable supplier. Unfortunately, we often came across huge plantations that we didn’t want to support, even when they were organically certified. Our approach is to work with permaculture systems that foster the greatest possible biodiversity.
We eventually found what we were looking for in a small community called WITOKA. A few years ago, they decided to put Ecuadorian coffee back on the map. Robusta coffee had faded into the background over recent decades because of the huge Arabica plantations. Yet Robusta has about twice as much caffeine and a very interesting flavour profile! WITOKA won the international award for best Robusta coffee in 2019, 2021 and 2022. We visited the community to see the growing and processing for ourselves—and, of course, to meet the people behind the project.
We’ve documented our processes for you in a short video on YouTube. In our view, no seal in the world is as valuable as genuine transparency and communication.
3. Tasting & development
What a wild few days! Anyone who’s ever had too many cups of coffee knows why!
We spent a whole weekend visiting the WITOKA community. On the first day, we visited the forest gardens and looked at the drying facilities. The second day was all about finding the perfect roast and grind. We spent hours testing different roasts and grind sizes, then combined them with our guayusa powder to find the best blend.
The tasting went on until 7 pm. None of us could sleep, and the next day we were due to drive back to Tena and our guayusa community.
4. Sourcing & export
It’s not easy to buy from a Kichwa community that has never arranged an export to Europe, even though they make incredibly good coffee!
To reduce the bureaucracy involved in invoicing, export arrangements and phytosanitary documents, we therefore connected our guayusa community with WITOKA. That allowed us not only to buy excellent coffee, but also to build a wonderful partnership between two communities from different regions.
5. Challenges
Covid-19 also had a major impact on global logistics. Finding a suitable ship was incredibly difficult, and the ship we did find spent around a month and a half at sea longer than planned. As a result, our planned launch date had to be pushed back again and again. Reserved packing slots, marketing campaigns and packaging orders all added complications and cost.
In the end, the launch was delayed by three months. The quality, however, was not affected, thanks to WITOKA’s excellent processing and secure packaging.
We’d love to hear your feedback and constructive criticism—and your stories of staying alert with our Guayusa-Coffee-Powder.