The Oracle
Astro Black and Cosmo Dark, The Oracle knows you inside out. The fortune teller of coffee, comes wrapped in a dark chocolate cloak, almonds in her mouth and cherries on her nose.
This lot is a washed blend from La Resistencia and Sueños de Semilla, in Colombia and Honduras.
Enjoy as espresso or pour over.
Café Colis Resistencia
Café Colis Resistencia is the informal name used by the coffee-producing members of the Indigenous Xinka who want to develop an international market for their coffee, and finally receive fair prices for their work. Colis is a nickname for Mataquescuintla, which is known for growing cauliflower — coliflor — and where the group began. It has since spread to two more groups, centred on Nueva Santa Rosa and Casillas.
Our connection to them came through their peaceful resistance to the Escobal silver mine, whose long shadow still falls across the nearby Xinka communities. Owned and operated by the Canadian-based Pan-American Silver, it is estimated to be the second-largest silver mine in the world, and it was built without the consultation or the consent of local people — in direct contravention of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
With a long history of resisting colonisation and encroachment on their territory, the Xinka have waged a peaceful resistance against the mine for more than a decade, achieving historic firsts not only for themselves but for Indigenous peoples across Guatemala. In 2017 they won the suspension of the mine's licence, upheld by the Constitutional Court in 2018, which found the original owners, Tahoe Resources, had failed to obtain free, prior and informed consent. For a minority Indigenous group to achieve that — when even the Mayan peoples, more than half the country's population, had not — is remarkable.
The suspension still stands. The Xinka have spent the last eight years documenting the mine's cultural and environmental impact on their territory alongside independent observers from around the world. Those results were delivered to the Constitutional Court in 2025 and are pending ratification.
Getting the harvest out, and parchment drying under cover — the villages around Mataquescuintla, Nueva Santa Rosa and Casillas.
The struggle has carried a cost. Growers we work with have been attacked, shot, imprisoned and threatened, and some members have left the country or gone into hiding. The corruption that got the mine approved persists in the communities, where local officials and politicians are openly understood to be financially compromised by the mine's subsidiaries. The Xinka still live with their heads on a swivel, aware that resistance can make them a target among their own neighbours.
Our engagement is premised on our own roots. As a Canadian company we are painfully aware of Canada's involvement in extractive projects across the Global South, and how consistently they leave death and destruction behind. Pan-American Silver is not a Canadian company; it was incentivised by past Canadian governments to set up offices here in exchange for tax breaks. In supporting this group we hope to contribute to a viable future for the Xinka as coffee growers, and to raise our voices about the dangers of unmitigated extraction.
Our efforts here may be small, but they keep growing. Three grower groups and more than 70 families now take part. Where these growers once sold cherry to environmentally harmful wet mills at low prices, they now receive interest-free anticipation payments and whole-crop commitments at prices set in consensus with each community. With a newly established cupping lab, led by the growers themselves, the Xinka are now assessing and learning from their own work.