Chaletenango 

El Derrumbo

Pacamara 

Washed

1350m 

2020

Notes Of A Roaster From The Underground: Citrus Fruits, Sweet, Intense Fruit Acidity

      Omni-roast (Espresso/Brew)

FINCA EL DERRUMBO MIKROLOT, EL SALVADOR

Finca El Derrumbo is owned by Vincente Rafael Diaz, who is committed to selectively harvesting his cherries to ensure they are at uniform ripeness for best quality. After picking the coffee, he depulps it the same day, ferments it dry for 10–12 hours, and then washeds it before moving it to patios to dry for 9–13 days. Finca El Derrumbo is owned by Vincente Rafael Diaz, who is committed to selectively harvesting his cherries to ensure they are at uniform ripeness for best quality. After picking the coffee, he depulps it the same day, ferments it dry for 10–12 hours, and then washeds it before moving it to patios to dry for 9–13 days.One place where Vincente’s commitment to quality most stands out is in the actual harvesting of coffee cherries. Rather than harvesting all coffee cherries at once (as most growers do), Vincente only gathers uniformly ripe cherries. This increases his operating expenses, as the method requires multiple pickings. It also greatly improves the quality of the coffee produced, though, because only ripe cherries make it into lots.

History

Known as “the land of volcanoes,” El Salvador is the smallest Central American country (roughly the same size as New Jersey), but its reputation among specialty-coffee-growing regions has grown larger-than-life, especially since the early 2000s. While coffee was planted and cultivated here mostly for domestic consumption starting in the mid-1700s, it became a stable and significant crop over the next 100 years, notably increasing in national importance during the late 1800s, when the country’s indigo exports were threatened by the development and widespread marketability of synthetic dyes.

As coffee grew in economic importance, different government programs designed to increase production through land, tax, and military-exemption incentives created a small but strong network of wealthy landowners who gained control over the coffee market, in addition to the individual smallholders who were growing coffee as part of their subsistence farming and would sell their cherry to the larger estates or to mills.

By the late 1970s coffee exports accounted for 50 percent of the GDP, but socioeconomic and political unrest hurled the country into civil war for more than a decade, and in the 1980s various land-redistribution projects and agrarian reform disjointed the coffee industry and caused the market to decline. Lacking the resources to continue farming, producers abandoned their coffee farms, and many were left overgrown and unharvested for years until a peace agreement was reached in the 1990s.

It is often said that the Cup of Excellence competition, which came to El Salvador in 2003, was the beginning of the new “wave” of interest in Salvadoran coffee, shining the first light on some of the special varieties the small country grows.