El Salvador Santa Ana La Ilusion

This farm is part of a project with an El Salvadorian producer, Jose Antonio Salaverria and he’s two sons Andres Salaverria and Jose Antonio Salaverria the younger. They are now the 6th generation of coffee producers. The ancestors started with coffee in Huachapan. Jose Antonio Senior was offered a house from he’s father in 1970, but told him he wanted a instead. And he was given Finca Los Nogales, that’s still in the family and one of the farms we are buying from the group. The coffees from the different farms are all processed at their central mill, Las Cruces. They bought Beneficio Las Cruses in 1990 and have done a lot of improvements since then. A lot of their success is based on their passion for coffee. They have been hard working and realistic, patient and focused on quality to make it sustainable. They have also managed to build a great team. Jose Antonio consider the workers and the team as the biggest asset.

They have three different main areas of coffee production around the Santa Ana volcano in El Salvador. They have always been producing high quality at a larger scale, but previously the coffee was mainly separated into a few brand names based on the three main areas, such as Santa Rita, San Francisco and El Molino. El Molino is an old mill with surrounding farms and was bought 80 years ago by the family. The farms at El Molino is about 100 years old. They have had the San Francisco complex from about 2002. Santa Rita from 2005. But their three coffee growing areas actually consist of a great number of initial farms and new farms they have inherited or bought over the last decades. When we started a quality program with them in 2011 they started to do way more lot separation. They basically started to separated out several small farms and blocks with the better altitude, quality potential and growing conditions. The farms we we work with and buy are mainly from 1400 to 1750 meters above sea level. This is regarded as a good altitude in El Salvador. In this area it’s hard to grow coffees above this level. This is part of a long-term project. We are pre-contracting most of the coffees based on three year contracts. We are not only doing the separation by farms and blocks (tablones), but are also trying to optimize quality by changing the process to prepare a different and value added product. It’s basically done by changing the preparation from the coffees are picked by blocks and enters the pulper, through fermentation and soaking as well as the drying methods. They also have a number of different varietals at their farms, and are currently doing a lot of experiments. The majority is still a mix of the old traditional Bourbon Elite, and something they call Hibrido San Fransisco wich is a mix of Bourbon Elite and Pacas.