Marlene Drack visits the Nussbaumer School in Guatemala, built in 2019

For a good year now, the finest highland Arabica varieties from Nussbaumer have been in the traditional cups of the Zauner confectionery. In a gentle drum roasting process, the beans are roasted and refined by hand by Marlene Drack, Austria’s youngest coffee roaster, in the heart of the Salzkammergut region.

In 2019, the traditional Gmundner family business also built a school in Guatemala, thereby contributing to the development of the region from which the finest Nussbaumer blends originate.

Visit to the “Nussbaumer School” in Guatemala

The “Nussbaumer School” was built in the summer of 2019 in the small mountain village of Lampocoy in Guatemala, entirely financed by the Nussbaumer company and built by coffee farmers from the region, as well as by parents of the children who now attend the school.

Education and health continue to take a back seat in Guatemala’s government. The Ministry of Education provides computers and learning programs, trains and pays teachers, but only if school buildings are available. Unfortunately, the government there does not care about the construction of such.

Thus, some time ago, the team around Marlene Drack decided without further ado to take care of the construction of a school in Lampocoy, which was so urgently needed for the children in the region.
Now, for the first time, Marlene had the opportunity to get a first-hand impression of the school. The school also has a small kitchen where the 280 schoolchildren are cooked for every day. The school often provides the only hot meal a day for many children in Guatemala.

Many components influence the quality in the cup

For Marlene Drack, in addition to the highest quality of the beans, their origin and the people behind them and their fate also play a role. At the end of February, the young roaster therefore embarked on a journey to the countries of origin, Guatemala and Costa Rica. The highlands of Central America have ideal geographical and climatic conditions for growing first-class coffee.

Visiting various coffee farms, which are also suppliers of green coffee to the Gmundner company, she was able to gain interesting insights into their daily work, as well as the difficulties that the farmers have to deal with. Wildly fluctuating coffee prices on the world market, pests and bad weather presented coffee farmers with major challenges during this year’s harvest. Nevertheless, they were able to achieve first-class quality again this year, and are already confident about the next harvest.

It is not only Marlene Drack as a roaster who benefits from origin trips such as these, as she can thus ensure the quality of her products and at the same time deepen her knowledge of coffee cultivation and processing, but also the producers, who through personal contact gain an impression of the value placed on their product in Europe.

The coffee farmers were especially happy about the fence stollen brought by Marlene.

The aromatic Nussbaumer coffee is available, among other things, as an exclusive Zauner house blend for the home: To the store.