Some thoughts on El Salvador.

El Salvador was once a country of 9 million people; three million of which have since left. Most of them are now living in the United States. 1.5 Million live in the city of San Salvador. It is a compact country with a long coastline and is now only beginning to see an influx of tourists.

Having survived the political crisis of the 1980’s that devastated much of the economy, the coffee growers were then faced with a second crisis: the down market of the 1990’s. Prior to this El Salvador was one of the largest coffee growers in Central America, with an output greater than that of Costa Rica. It has a rich and deep coffee growing history and tradition. The net effect of this crisis is that many farms went out of business. As we traveled the countryside, we also saw a great number of abandoned coffee mills (beneficios in Spanish). To make matters worse, many workers left the countryside for the city of San Salvador. Now, in an up coffee market, they do not want to return.

March 12, 2007.

This morning we were met by Roberto Llach-Hill and Rodolfo Ruffino. Roberto is the owner of the San Diego farm which supplied Jeremiahs’ Pick with our Wild Forest Bourbon Pick of the Harvest for 2007. He established the Los Nogales mill, where the coffee that we have purchased is prepared carefully for export.

His family has been involved in agriculture and related industries for many generations. As we would learn later, his grandfather founded the J. Hill mill in Santa Ana over 100 years ago. Rodolfo is the manager of that mill, also known as Beneficio Las Tres Puertas.

The first thing that struck us about the San Diego farm and the Los Nogales was its proximity to San Salvador. When visiting farms in the past we often traveled for 6 hours or more to reach them. Here, the mill is only 45 minutes from the city and 20 minutes from its ever expanding suburbs where we enjoyed an iced coffee at Roberto’s daughter’s coffee shop before reaching the farm. This family has owned the farm since the 1990’s.

These farms provide a permanent buffer against suburban growth maintaining a shade canopy full of Laurels, Oaks and hardwoods that is home to birds, butterflies and thousands of noisy chirping and squealing cicadas in full breeding glory.

In the heat of March, prior to the rainy season, the trees looked tired. They were. Not only had these trees produced the fruit of the previous season, they were exhausted further from setting the buds that would flower with the May rains.

While visiting the farm and the mill we learned about the difficulties in converting a conventional coffee farm to organic production and the realities of organic coffee growing.

1. First and foremost, crop yield drops some 30 to 40% when conventional fertilization stops. This makes the premium that is paid for organic green coffee all the more important once the farm has completed the three year transition to organic.

2. The most difficult element to replace in the growth cycle is nitrogen. In order to do so, Roberto built a worm farm. The worms compost the fruit of the coffee cherries after it is milled. Then they collect worm urine from these composting areas and use it to make their own organic fertilizer for the farm. They also use natural lime from limestone and ash in this fertilizer.





3. The fact that surprised me the most was this; organic farms are more likely to be founded in depressed coffee markets. More coffee farmers embrace organics during these lean periods in order to earn the premium price. Since the market has risen in the last few years, many growers in El Salvador have now gone back to producing conventional coffees.

4. Becoming organic raised the pH of the farm which has discouraged the growth of fungus, a consistent problem for coffee growers.



5. Their farm and mill is multi certified as organic and sustainable and they can trace any one of their lots from the farm through the mill and into export. We were reminded again that it takes some 500 pounds of coffee cherries to produce 75 pounds of export gourmet quality coffee.

After viewing the mill we stopped to visit Roberto’s varietal garden. In this garden he has planted a wide variety of Arabica coffee plants to see how each reacts to the climate and conditions of his farm. Many were well known including, Bourbon, Cataui and Catura. Others were new to us such as the rare and now trendy Geisha varietal.

Geisha has been generating attention for its extremely floral characteristics. He was also growing a naturally decaffeinated species known as “LeRoy” and a fusion of Ethiopian and Indonesian plants, producing a Mocha Java on one tree. Most were less than two years old and would begin producing cherries in the next season.

The farm and mill employs 40 persons year round, down from 150 during the harvest. Roberto would like to hire more workers; he is having trouble finding people who want to work on his farm. During the visit we visited the farm kitchen and enjoyed a simple lunch of tortillas (corn and much thicker then we see here in the US) and beans.

We returned to San Salvador and the Llach family graciously hosted us for dinner. We met the gracious and wonderful Cassandra, one of their seven dogs, and had a great meal on their patio. Here is a photo of Cassandra.

March 13.

Today we left San Salvador and traveled to the colonial city of Santa Ana to visit the J Hill Mill. As with many other trips in El Salvador this journey was short. On the way we stopped to view Lake Coatepeque, a large fresh water lake formed in a volcanic crater where many residents of San Salvador have their vacation homes.

Not enough is understood by the consumer about the role that the mill plays in the production of gourmet coffee. With so much focus on growing conditions, it is easy to overlook this critical step in the process. It is here at the mill that coffee is delivered from the farms and readied for export. There are also a series of choices that a mill operator makes that affects the environment around the mill and the quality of the finished product.

Coffee cherries are received from farms, washed, pulped, briefly held in fermentation tanks and then dried. The pulping process created a large amount of, well, pulp, from the coffee cherry. This pulp is either used as fertilizer or in the case of this mill dried and then burned as a source of energy, in this case firing the driers These mills use a lot of water as well, as we saw later, this water can either be wasted or re-used.

This mill, one of the largest in El Salvador was founded in the late 1800’s by Roberto Llach-Hills grandfather who came from England to sell cashmere wool, a project that quickly failed in the heat of this region. It was a different experience to see a mill after the harvest has been completed. The large brick patios where the coffee is sun-dried were empty and the warehouses were bulging with finished product.

After arriving at the mill we cupped a variety of coffees that were processed there including an outstanding Peaberry. We learned the name of peaberries in Spanish, “carcaol”, which also translates to snail. We also cupped the coffee from the farm of Rodolfo Rudino and several others.

Jeremiah found them to be uniformly clean and balanced and particularly liked the concentrated flavor and body of the peaberries. If you would like to try a coffee that features peaberries, click here to purchase our current offering from the Sigri Estate in Papua New Guinea.

One factor that differentiates this mill is the makeup of the farms that supply it. Many mills purchase their coffee cherries from small stations that dot the countryside in growing region, often receiving cherries from hundreds or even thousands of small producers. Here less than 200 farms supply the mill, which is owned by 10 shareholders who are also suppliers to the mill.

We walked the mill and had observed the various procedures that they use to sort the dry coffee beans to eliminate defects and properly size the coffee beans. One room is dedicated to hand sorting the various coffees that they produce. The grounds of the mill, which employs 150 people, were impeccably clean and full of workers doing maintenance on the mill to prepare for the next year’s crop.

We ate lunch in the home that the founder built which had changed little since the early 1900’s, a beautiful wood structure in a Victorian style. The highlight of the meal for us was the exceptional home made Salvadoran tortillas (much thicker than we are used to seeing) and simple white cheese. These were surpassed by a Quesadilla, again nothing to do with anything we eat in the US. Our host explained that for them Quesadilla meant cheese of the day and here it appeared in the form of an exceptionally light yet rich cheese cake and of course, a good cup of coffee.

Later we viewed a series of 6 ponds where they settle and filter the waste water from the milling process before releasing it into the local river.

That evening we traveled through Ahuachapin and Ataco to a lodge called Santa Leticia located in the heart of this coffee growing region. If you are traveling in this area it is a great and reasonable place to stay.

You can get more information on the lodge at www.coffee.com.sv. As we climbed in elevation to over 4500 feet we enjoyed the cool air, a relief after the warm humid climate we had been in.

The next morning we met Miguel, an agronomist that works for one of the largest coffee processors in El Salvador, UNEX. He gives agricultural advice to the organic and conventional farms that supply coffee to UNEX that it mills and exports.

We traveled several hours to a region closer to San Salvador called Balsamo. This hilly district is home to a number of coffee growers and mills. We purchased a container of organic coffee from one of these farms this year. We later learned that the farm was known as Monte Sol, but had gone through a name change in recent years. That would be explained to us later.

On this farm we met the manager Pablo and learned again what farmers have to go through to produce organic coffee. On this farm when they switched production to organics they saw their output fall by some 50%, mostly attributed to the changeover from commercial fertilizers to natural ones. Without the premium that is paid for organic coffee the farm would not have survived. Pablo pointed to several large trees that surrounded the small farm house that we met in and told us that they would have been gone, sold for the value of the wood. Since then production has recovered quite a bit but they do not believe it will ever return to those levels.

In many ways that practiced a simpler approach to organic farming then that of the San Diego farm. They only use coffee pulp for fertilizer for example.

Another factor that is important to understand is that farms like these are completely covered with shade trees, so much so that they will be selectively thinning the trees this year to increase production and manage fungus growth. It is too shady now for optimal growth and for the grower; it is a question of balancing the plants need for sun with the right amount of shade.

Perhaps one of the greatest benefits to the environment is the changeover in weed management. In previous years they simply dumped herbicides onto the paths in between the rows of coffee trees. Now they use hand labor and machetes to control the weeds, cutting them low twice a year. Not only has the use of chemicals been eliminated, they believe that it provides the farm with better erosion control.

They explained to us that the farm was owned by a woman who was the former Miss El Salvador, Maria Elena Sol who would meet us later that day after a great seafood meal at the Pacific Coast. She explained that afternoon that she was a believer in organic farming because it was the right thing to do. She has renamed the farm Amitabha, taken from the Buddhist religion which she practices, meaning light without boundaries. What worries her most about Organic production in El Salvador is that since the recent increases in green coffee prices 12 of 14 farms that previously supplied UNEX have gone back to conventional methods. She wonders whether they will continue to mill organic coffees.

An Overview

After viewing these farms and many others in the region you can see first hand that coffee is a relatively friendly crop for the local ecology. It provides good ground cover and is home to shade trees, birds, butterflies and other animals that are indigenous to a region. With the ever increasing population pressures coffee farms are being plowed under near cities like San Salvador and San Jose Costa Rica. Buying coffee from these farms keeps crucial green belt areas intact for migrating birds as well.

El Salvador, and its coffee industry, was hit by a double crisis in the 1980’s and 1990’s, a civil war and low coffee prices. Through it all there farmers have maintained their integrity and are now producing consistently balanced and clean cupping coffees. Buying organic coffee from El Salvador supports progressive farmers who believe in the organic movement and are making a difference in their economy and their ecology.

On a personal note San Francisco is home to many Salvadoran restaurants and their famous local dish, pupusas. While we enjoyed our meals in the country, we realized that pupusas are street food and just never had the chance to stop and enjoy them. As we drove to the airport on the 14th at 6:30 am we passed Oloculita and its numerous pupuserias. People were already lining up. We had no time to stop. There will have to be a next time.

If you want to try coffee from the San Diego farm it is used in our Pick of the Harvest Wild Forest Bourbon. Coffee from the Amitabha farm forms the backbone of our Organic French and Organic Breakfast Blend coffees.

April 3, 2007
Jules Kragen