El Salvador La Chiltota Red Honey Pacamara Grainpro

Coffee Background

El Salvador is a country enjoying a coffee renaissance. The civil war has been over for nearly three decades and subsequent decades of violence has begun to wane. Leaf rust is ever present, but renovation strategies have curbed the crisis. Almost everybody here possesses the coffee know-how drawn from three or four generations. There are simply no limits to the ways this generation of El Salvadoran producers has embraced the specialty coffee market with the duality of tradition and innovation. This is exactly the way Anny Ruth Pimentel has managed her family’s estate in El Boquerón on the Quezaltepec Volcano. She continues to cultivate traditional varieties like Pacamara and relies on shade trees to protect the ecology of the estate. During the harvest a great deal of care and focus is dedicated to instituting careful brix measurements to understand optimum ripeness before picking. The harvest is so precise that every lot can be traced to a specific day and section of the estate. This particular lot of Pacamara was selected from a 5-acre section of the estate called La Chiltota. Anny Ruth also takes steps, uncommon in El Salvador, to control the entire post-harvest operation all the way through exporting and marketing. Harvested cherries are taken to a fully equipped mill called Loma La Gloria located at the bottom of the estate. Using recirculating water, the harvested cherries are floated to remove less dense and damaged coffee. Access to water is so limited that all of the coffee at Loma La Gloria is processed without water either as a honey or a natural. This particular honey processed lot was depulped and placed directly on patios with the mucilage still attached and then expertly dried over a period of 26 days. The dried coffee is stored, evaluated at the cupping lab and then milled for export, which all takes place at Loma La Gloria.