Growing up in the Reagan era, most in my generation (genX) came to know Central America as a lawless region, inhabited by communist guerilla fighters; proxy soldiers for our cold war rival, the Soviets. Tom Brokaw would regale the American public nightly with stories of bloodshed, strife and endless conflict. Central America was no place you would ever want to live, much less visit. Or so we were taught. Since the fall of the Soviet Union and establishment of mostly functional U.S.-supported democracies in the region, I’d thought very little about El Salvador, the smallest of the seven countries that make up the Central American isthmus.
Fortunately, I was blessed with an opportunity to expand my horizons. It came in an invitation from Trent Lundberg, owner of Backroom Coffee Roasters, headquartered in Galena, Ohio. He asked if I would be interested in visiting a friend’s “Finca,” or coffee plantation, outside San Miguel, El Salvador. Backroom would be looking into direct-sourcing their coffee for import and could use my Spanish skills and taste buds on the mission. The experience would be enlightening in more ways than one.
Our trip would consist of six days full immersion into the coffee culture of El Salvador. We would stay at his friend’s Guillermo’s plantation, “La Finca Piedra,” a 750 acre farm, with roughly 225 acres of coffee trees, interspersed under the canopy of the tropics. The farm scales the western side of the very-active Chaparrastique volcano, which recently erupted in December 2022, only weeks before our visit. We would be accompanied by Larry Clark, legendary Columbus chef and caterer (Made From Scratch, Inc). Our hosts, three Salvadorian brothers and friends, Guillermo Cruz, of Columbus, Ohio, Nelson Cruz, and Fernando Duarte, stewards of the “La Finca Piedra” plantation.
El Salvador is situated between Guatemala to the east, Honduras to the west and the Pacific Ocean to the south, spanning the length of its southern border. The landscape is mountainous and tropical, with sugar cane fields dotting the valleys in between. Over millions of years its topography was shaped by shifting tectonic plates and numerous volcanoes (38 in total). Not a large territory geographically, the country of El Salvador could fit into the state of Ohio twice. Its population stands at roughly 7 million souls.
El Salvador and its economy were decimated by civil war between 1979-1992, seeing their once robust coffee industry fall into disfunction. After many violent years that saw mass emigration to the U.S., a constitutional democracy formed in 1992. The current president, 40-year-old Nayib Bukele, was elected in 2019 with a mandate to represent a new, modern generation of Salvadorians. Today, El Salvador is a much safer country in which to live and travel. In the four years since Bukele’s election, the country has seen a precipitous drop in gang violence (60%) and a requisite boom in economic development. The official currency became the U.S. dollar, providing a new level of lending credibility to the country’s exceptionally entrepreneurial business community. From all indications, El Salvador is a country on its way up.
Our residence for the week, La Finca Piedra, sits on the western side of the Chaparrastique volcano in the southeast, at an elevation of roughly 3,000 feet, about halfway up the volcano. This massive, 7,000-foot volcano masked the sunrise from the east until about 9:30 a.m. each day. However in the evening hour, our southwestern vantage towards the Pacific Ocean and its majestic sunsets proved breathtaking. Temperatures at sea level are hot and humid year round, yet the air at La Finca Piedra was crisp and cool, yet dense, a lovely anomaly. To hear our hosts tell it, it is this unique and temperate climate, along with the nutrient-laden, volcanic ash soil, that gives their coffee beans such a unique flavor profile.
The primary arabica coffee varieties that grow on La Finca Piedra are Bourbon and Pacamara plants. Bourbon coffee trees were first planted in 1708 by the French on the volcanic island of Reunion, in the Indian Ocean. The plant mutated and made its way to Brazil and throughout Central America. Bourbon trees on this volcanic finca appear to have found an ideal home. Pacamara coffee on the other hand is a hybrid cross between Pacas, a natural Bourbon mutation discovered in El Salvador in 1949, and Maragogipe coffee plants, which while usually highly susceptible to plant rust, thrive at this particular elevation of 3,000-6,000 feet. The Pacamara variety produces larger beans inside a sweet, brighter-red cherry casing, or Cascara.
Once settled into the hacienda, we set out upon Chaparrastique in Guillermo’s truck to see their operation first hand. We would be meeting Mauricio and Juan, who manage the agricultural side of La Finca Piedra and its 40 to 50 pickers. The cherry pickers are the backbone of the operation, performing their duties between 5 a.m. and noon, Monday through Friday, before the sun sits directly overhead. There is no industrial farm equipment that could manage the random and lush mountainside terrain of this finca, as they do in the flatland coffee farms of Brazil. Each individual coffee cherry, containing two beans, is picked by hand and tossed into a yellow sack, which at its capacity contains 125 pounds of coffee cherries. Each sack is then carried by hand out of the forest, to the nearest road, to be loaded onto trucks and taken to the bean mill. Each picker fills nearly a dozen bags each day, receiving a wage of roughly $40 a day, quite adequate in this part of the world.
At the mill, the raw cherries are manually loaded by ladder and dumped into a wet mill where the beans are separated from the cherry shell. Once the cascara is shed from the beans, net weight of each sack is reduced by 80%, leaving just 25 pounds of beans (before they are dried out). Those beans, which in their raw form are a whitish-green color, are then spread out over large flat areas of sun-drenched, radiant paver stones, where they are raked and re-spread daily, drying for about two weeks. Through the drying process, the beans turn an earthy green color and will lose another 20% of their weight to dehydration. Total weight reduction leaves about 20 pounds in roastable beans for coffee, out of the original 125 pound sack of cherries. The cascara waste product is recycled via compost and returned to the earth.
The process is painstaking and laborious, but for the true coffee aficionado, is worth understanding. These days, 75% of the coffee we consume in the U.S. comes from flatland, full-sun fields, as are common in Brazil. These farms employ copious amounts of chemicals to fight off bugs and weeds. They also utilize industrial picking machinery that damages trees and leaves local habitats decimated. Such methods only allow for monoculture coffee plants with very few distinguishable characteristics. These are usually the beans you see roasted beyond dark.
The magic of the plants on La Finca Piedra is their natural environment. Coffee plants grow best at elevations where they enjoy partial shade from between 20 and 30 native arbor species. This environment allows the trees to grow and fruit at a slower rate which accentuates the character and flavor of the beans. The natural canopy of native trees also provides a home for many species of tropical birds, which consume the insects that would otherwise require pesticides to tame. We witnessed countless birds such as green toucans, hummingbirds and toragoz, the national bird of El Salvador, tree-hopping throughout the farm.
Back at the house, we indulged both of the varieties via espresso, french press, and regular 12-cup drip-brew, to understand the chemistry involved in each method. The Bourbon coffee had sweet, chocolate-berry notes, whereas the Pacamara and Pacamara-honey varieties lent themselves to a more citrus, or raspberry profile, with just a hint of the chocolate notes, which truly blew us away. It is for many of these very reasons that a Salvadoran was crowned champion, the first from a producing country, of the World Barista Coffee championship in Bogota, Columbia, in 2018. I have no doubt more accolades will follow.
Like most of life’s endeavors, whether culinary or otherwise, the fastest, most efficient methods of production aren’t usually the most satisfying or delicious. It’s the dedication to one’s craft and the people whose knowledge and sweat permeate the production, that reap the greatest rewards.
It turns out a truly great cup of coffee is no different. Our new friends from El Salvador at La Finca Piedra know and live this truth daily.
All photos by Rich B Terapak
