DISCOVERY

Systems of Production

This month's coffees illustrate the very different ways that coffee can be produced across the coffee belt. The producers of this month's lots have very different aims, which result in very different production methods and therefore different cup profiles.

Finca Santa Rosa is a project by Raul Rivera in the Chalatenango region of El Salvador, aiming to produce varying microlots of the highest quality. Raul has an obsession with quality, and keeps each day lot separate in order to find the top lots, and enter these into various green coffee competitions.

Mococa is a project by renowned Brazilian producers Fazenda Ambiental Fortaleza, combining the work of 50 producers who align to their quality and environmental standards. This much larger lot may miss out on the heights of top nano-lots like at Finca Santa Rosa, but provides a far more approachable and consistent product.

Honey Pacamara

Finca Santa Rosa

This is our fourth year buying coffee from Jorge Raul Rivera. Raul is a second generation coffee producer, based just outside the town of La Palma, in the far north-west of El Salvador, close to the border with Honduras. His farm, Finca Santa Rosa, is located not far from La Palma, at around 1550 masl on the slopes of El Pital, El Salvador’s highest point. The farm is planted mainly with the famed Salvadoran varietal Pacamara, and has produced some of the country’s highest quality and most innovative coffees in recent years.

Jorge Raul Rivera Sr. began growing coffee, mainly of low quality, in the region around La Palma in 1979. This was the very beginning of El Salvador’s brutal civil war, so many were abandoning their land, selling cheap and fleeing into neighbouring Honduras. Raul Sr. capitalised on this, bought some plots cheaply and began to grow coffee. He was one of the first to grow coffee in the area, and one of the few that stayed during the war. As El Salvador began to settle again after the war, the Riveras bought the land that would become Finca Santa Rosa, and began to grow timber, due to government subsidies aiming to help the post-war rebuilding effort. However, in 2003, the Cup of Excellence came to El Salvador, a great showcase for the first few speciality coffee producers in the country.

Honey Pacamara

Cup of Excellence

The Riveras saw a prime opportunity to enter the high quality coffee market, and realised that the conditions at Finca Santa Rosa were perfect. The family knew that if they could produce micro-lots of high enough quality, they could fetch high prices at the Cup of Excellence auctions, making their farm highly profitable. They therefore planted their farm with Pacamara, famed for high quality cups, and set off in pursuit of the Cup of Excellence crown. Years of work have resulted in three wins, in 2014, 2017 and 2019, all with their honey-processed Pacamara. The pine from the old timber plantations has been retained as shade for the coffee, always reminding us of a Danish pine forest during our visits.

Visiting Raul is always a treat, he’s a genuinely passionate and professional coffee producer who’s enthusiasm is rather infectious, in fact it’s sometimes difficult to leave Finca Santa Rosa, as Raul is always keen to share his knowledge and experience. The pride he takes in every single detail of the farm and step of the process is obvious, and this translates into the incredibly high quality lots of coffee he is able to produce. During our visit in March 2020, we were also able to visit Raul’s small cupping lab in San Salvador and taste some of the truly special lots he was considering entering into the Cup of Excellence.

This Honey Pacamara is becoming somewhat of a feature coffee for us here at La Cabra, with the floral notes of the Pacamara shining clearly through the sugary sweet character produced by the honey process, tied together by a crisp blood orange freshness.

Natural Yellow Bourbon

Fazenda Ambiental Fortaleza

This lot is created with the support of well known Brazilian producing group Fazenda Ambiental Fortaleza, or FAF. FAF take sustainability on their own farms very seriously, and this is no different when it comes to buying coffees from neighbouring farms. There are several criteria that these farms have to fulfil before they can be considered by FAF, with an overarching theme of working in harmony with nature to create the highest quality coffees. This has not been easy Brazil, well known for its rather high intensity agriculture industry. Sacrificing this efficiency in order to chase quality and environmental responsibility is seen as a compromise by a majority of agro-businesses here, but nevertheless FAF have convinced 50 producers to be part of this program, known as Bobolink.

Natural Yellow Bourbon

Mococa

Also unusual for Brazil, these farms all pick ripe cherries by hand instead of using mechanical stripping methods, and dry slowly and evenly on African raised beds instead of in full sun on patios. They are also at a high altitude in Brazilian terms, with many of the farms reaching 1400 masl, and grow only high quality Arabica varietals, with this lot in particular made up of 100% Yellow Bourbon. This leads to a clean natural Brazil profile, with sweet milk chocolate and hazelnut notes joined by soft ripe fruit notes more reminiscent of Central American coffees.

DISCOVERY

Best of both worlds

During our years in the coffee industry, we have seen countless modes of production, across many different farms and origin countries. There are many ways to produce quality coffee, from the hyper-boutique lots created by Cup of Excellence winners like Raul Rivera, to the large, consistent and well-composed larger lots we see from companies like FAF in Brazil. Both coffees this month are excellent examples of this, from the comforting and sweet chocolate notes of Mococa, to the wild and intense blood orange freshness of Raul Rivera's honey Pacamara.