Usulutan

Las Palmas

Pacamara 

Washed

1500 - 1600 m

2020

Notes Of A Roaster From The Underground: vegetal notes, cane sugar, caramel and citrus

      Omni-roast (Espresso/Brew)

LAS PALMAS PACAMARA, EL SALVADOR

Gilberto Baraona was the head of a family business with over 130 years of tradition in specialty coffee. The Tecapa company brings together 5 farms and a benefecio in the Usulutan region in the south-east of El Salvador, on the slopes of the Tecapa volcano. Gilberto was one of the most renowned coffee producers in El Salvador having won numerous awards in the world of specialty coffee.
Today, Diego and Fabiola, his children, have taken over the activities of their father who tragically died of Covid in June 2020. This is to tell you how much the continuation of this partnership is important to us at Belco.

PROCESS: Yeast Fermentation

This Pacamara microlot, before being fully washed processed, was fermented with yeast. Lalcafe is a yeast which, diluted with water, is applied to the beans just out of the pulper. Fermentation lasts 20 hours and beans are then washed with clear water. This process results in a cup with brighter acidity, more complex flavours, more vibrant fruit notes and more longlasting.

LAS PALMAS 

The Las Palmas farm is located in the Usulatan region, near the city of Berlin. It covers 20 hectares, 19 of which are dedicated to the cultivation of coffee. There is also 1 hectare of forest. Coffee trees grow between 1,500 and 1,600 meters in altitude and many varieties are cultivated: elite red bourbon, orange bourbon, pacas, pacamara, rume sudan, batian, java and Kenyan SL 28.
The coffees of this farm received 5 awards during the Cup Of Excellence.

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.