Hi! It's Me! Who I am
I guess it’s time to fully introduce myself.
Even some of my closest friends—the people who have watched Altiplano Reserve come together from day one—have described its creation in slightly ridiculous terms.
One said, “It’s like Elle Woods woke up one day and said, ‘I’m going to start a coffee business!’”
Another, less flattering but far more hilarious version was: “She just started talking about opening a coffee business one day, woke up, and defecated it out.”
So, let’s talk about who I actually am—and where Altiplano Reserve really came from.
I’m Jenn Nemecek. I was born and raised in Jackson, Michigan, and I’m a proud graduate of Western High School and Spring Arbor University.
My first trip to Guatemala was when I was six years old. My dad continued traveling there regularly, but I didn’t return until I was 25, when my parents announced that they were planning to move there.
As an only child, I found this fairly traumatizing. I honestly could not understand why they would want to leave Michigan and move to Guatemala, so they took me there to see it for myself.
Two years later, they moved.
By then, I had spent several years working as a community organizer in Detroit, Miami, and St. Petersburg. I was engaged and pregnant, but it became increasingly clear that I was going to be raising my baby largely on my own. My parents were already living in Guatemala, and they encouraged me to come there so they could help.
So, at four months pregnant, I got on a plane and moved to a country I had visited twice and where I spoke very little Spanish.
My son, Riley, was born a dual citizen in Guatemala in March 2012.
When he was about a year old, I started teaching English as a second language. My first teaching job paid roughly $75 a month.
Eventually, that career grew into something much bigger.
I became Administrative Director of Antigua Green School and Oxford Language Center Antigua. Oxford was built while I worked there on the grounds of La Azotea, one of Antigua’s historic coffee farms.
At the time, coffee was simply part of the landscape of my life.
From there, I became Communications and Public Relations Director for Constru Casa, a nonprofit that builds concrete-block homes for families in rural Guatemala who are living in houses made from adobe, sheet metal, wood, or even tarps.
That work took me into villages throughout Guatemala.
I met farmworkers and their families. I saw how people lived in communities tourists rarely visit. I learned about the economic realities of rural Guatemala not from a book or a tour, but by sitting in people’s homes, walking through their communities, and working alongside Guatemalan staff and families.
Later, I became Academic Director of Máximo Nivel Guatemala. During COVID, my work moved online, and I eventually became Chief Academic Officer before returning to the United States in 2023.
But education was only one part of my life in Guatemala.
I also spent years building small businesses.
I helped grow everything from a tiny ESL program operating one day a week out of a middle school, to a cell-phone repair kiosk, to a larger language academy and repair shop. Over the years, there was a restaurant, a cell-phone parts business, a makeup store, and more.
If there is one thing I learned from all of those businesses, it is how to start lean.
I look for the minimum actually required to make an idea work—not what people say you need, not what makes it look impressive, but what is truly necessary to create something people will value.
Then I build from there.
Usually with a combination of strategy, improvisation, stubbornness, and sheer force of will.
When I returned to the United States, I took a job. In 2024, I lost it.
That sent me right back into entrepreneurial mode.
I formed an LLC and started experimenting.
Dried corn and handmade tortillas?
Absolutely not. Too messy. Too labor intensive.
Candles?
Maybe.
Cacao?
Interesting.
Roasting coffee?
Very interesting.
Then I was offered another job, and all of those experiments went into a closet.
About a year and a half later, my mom decided she wanted to make Christmas presents for some of her friends.
Out came the candle wax.
Out came the molds.
And then—
Coffee?
One night, in what can only be described as an ADHD hyperfixation, I started researching coffee.
Specifically, I started researching the history of La Azotea—the coffee farm where I had once run a school.
And suddenly, something clicked.
I realized that I had spent more than a decade living right in the middle of Guatemalan coffee.
Coffee plants were everywhere.
My memories of Guatemala are filled with drying patios, beneficios, roasters, coffee trees, farms, villages, mountains, and cups of coffee served everywhere from restaurants to people’s homes.
My son literally grew up playing around coffee.
And without realizing it, I had absorbed much of the geography and culture behind it.
I also realized how opinionated I had become about Guatemalan coffee itself.
I knew which regions I loved.
I knew which flavor profiles I gravitated toward.
I knew that Huehuetenango Bourbon had been a perennial favorite of mine for years.
And I really, really missed drinking freshly roasted Guatemalan coffee.
That was the moment Altiplano Reserve stopped feeling like another business idea.
Because this wasn’t simply a product I could source, package, and sell.
The story ran much deeper than that.
I understood the culture surrounding it.
I understood some of the economic realities behind it.
I knew the villages.
I knew the landscapes.
I had worked with rural families.
I had lived beside the farms.
I had watched coffee move through the world around me for years without ever realizing that one day I would build something around it.
Altiplano Reserve became a way to bring those worlds together: Guatemala, entrepreneurship, storytelling, agriculture, flavor, and the place I now call home again in Michigan.
So yes.
From the outside, perhaps it looked like I woke up one morning and randomly decided to start a coffee company.
And, technically, there may have been a late-night hyperfixation involved.
But Altiplano Reserve didn’t really appear overnight.
It had been quietly developing for more than a decade.
I just finally recognized it.
Or, depending on which friend you ask, I defecated it out overnight.
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