First day in El Salvador, we’ve spent the day with Fernando Lima exploring his farms on the side of Santa Ana Volcano, El Corozo, Santa Elena, El Mirador, Campanula and Las Laderas which sit between 1400 – 1900 masl. Across the farms Fernando is now growing pacamara, bourbon, dwarf bourbon, yellow bourbon, geisha, catura, yellow catura and SL28, all of these varieties are thriving, especially the geisha!
Fernando was telling us that they’ve had close to perfect growing conditions for coffee over the past few months, with hardly any rain making the quality of the coffee even better than last year. The cherries across his farms are currently 50/50 ripe and under ripe, so another month and the pickers will be taken up to the farm to harvest the cherries.
Second day in El Salvador, started off in Finca Serbia, Fernando’s micro mill that he uses to process his high end coffees, he’s using a mix between traditional clay patios and raised African drying beds to dry the coffees, he was telling us how he hasn’t noticed much of a change in character and quality between the two drying processes, but only that the raised African beds take 3/4 days longer to fully dry.
Later on we travelled to Cuzcachapa Cooperative, one of the biggest Co-Op in El Salvador producing over 100,000 sacks of coffee a year. As we were there @Francis set up a fantastic blind cupping with the stand outs being Finca Buena Vista where our E1 Espresso comes from and Fernando’s farms Rumania and El Milagro, we’ll definitely be adding some of these to our offer list soon!
Day three in El Salvador, we spent the day with Ricardo Lima who is the farmer of our E1 Espresso, as Ricardo was showing us around the farms he was telling us how he’s creating hybrid root systems to make more hardy trees, by propagating certain varieties he is able to create stronger root systems that will make the plants live longer and more resilient against rust.
Currently he has 15,000 coffee seedlings in his nursery which will be planted around May time, many of these seedlings will be trained to grow horizontally in the more traditional way, this will give a more even coverage of sun over the trees, encouraging the cherries to ripen evenly, it will also be a lot easier for the pickers to harvest.
He was also telling us how he’s creating these red disks, they have been covered in a sticky substance and a straw with 50% methanol and 50% alcohol to attract insects that would otherwise damage the cherries, 5000 of these disks have been placed evenly across the farm to help prevent insect damage.
Ricardo has an arrangement with 1200 families around his mill where he supplies them with free drinking water, all he asks in return is to keep the villages clean and feed their dogs.
And of course it wouldn’t be the same if we didn’t have a massive bag of dog biscuits to feed the dogs along the way!
Fourth day in El Salvador we spent the day with Franklin Orellana at his farms, Finca Bolinas and La Asunción
Franklin is a 4th generation farmer in El Salvador, with his great grandfather buying the 150 hectare farm back in 1940. Franklin has recently made Finca Bolinas fully organic, it’s taken them three years to go through this process of audits and soil transitions, now they are on their first fully organic crop of honey and natural lots.
