In my two decades in El Salvador, I have always been on the
hunt for great coffee. I should clarify ... great coffee at a great price. You
can go to any high end coffee shop and pay $12/lb for their good stuff. But I
am not fond of paying retail! I have been given bags of coffee from family and
their friends. I have gotten coffee at various co-ops such as the one in
Ahuachapan and bought coffee directly from small fincas. I have even traded
cigars for coffee from a finca owner.
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| Fatima guarding the Chaparra. |
Most of the coffee here for local consumption is lightly
roasted “clara” and a favoured bean is the Pacamara which produces a mild
coffee with low acid.
I generally prefer a stronger coffee so I lean towards the
Bourbon Arabica bean, first developed by the French on the Island of Bourbon. I
like a cerezo process where the ripe red beans are dried in the sun as opposed
to being run through machines with lots of water which strips the fruit from
the green beans. Cerezo is more time consuming but oddly cheaper and produces a
more intense flavour.
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| Bags of washed and cerezo beans. |
The best coffee I have had have been from friends who own
fincas at a high altitude – 1,800 m above sea level. One of the big coffee
companies here, Quality Grains, owns a chain of cafes and they sell an
excellent gourmet dark roast at $7/lb wholesale.
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| The mechanical stripper. |
I am heading to Canada soon and wanted to bring about 35 lbs
of coffee with me. My friend’s stock is a bit low due to the low yield from
last year so I decided to try my luck with the beans at the Santa Tecla
Roastery. My friend uses this place to process, roast and bag his coffee and I
know they always have Bourbon Arabica and Pacamara coffee for sale.
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| The machine to separate the chaff. |
I went in shortly after 9 am and spoke with the owner and
made a deal to get 40 lbs of Bourbon Arabica roasted extra dark (but short of
Italian roast). This required 50 lbs of beans and they had some from San
Vicente grown at around 1,500 m. This
would normally produce 42 lbs of roasted beans (weight is loss as moisture
comes out) but with a dark roast, it would be closer to 40 lbs. Their normal
price for clara cerezo is $2.80 a pound but they gave me that same price for my
volume purchase even though they would get less weight due to the darker roast.
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| Before being run through the hand screen. You can see some of the dried cherries. |
The cerezo dried coffee cherries were run through a
mechanical stripper and then a couple of cleaners to remove the chaff – one mechanical
and one a hand screen. This isn’t always 100% so a few dried husks got into the
roaster.
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| The Roaster |
The gas furnace was turned on and the 200 year old German
roaster started to warm up. They ran another load first and the beans came out
light brown with very little smoke and I think a “pop” as the beans cracked
only once.
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| Starting to smoke |
My load went in and Roberto, the master roaster who has been
there for about 20 years, said it should take about 25 minutes. It starts off
slow but near the end, the beans get dark very fast. He kept pulling out
samples as the machine started smoking and I kept telling him to hold off for a
bit longer. We started seeing some almost burnt beans coming out and some large
clouds of smoke so he dumped the load into the cooling well. At this point, you
could hear a lot of secondary cracks as the coffee was turned in the hopper. I
think it came out close to a Vienna roast – dark brown and some shine on the
beans.
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| Cooling in the spin hopper |
When the beans had cooled down, I had my choice of grinders
and bags. The main grinder they have was converted from a corn grinder. It
works very quickly but the final product is fairly course and not very uniform.
I elected to have them put through a finer grounder and the 25 lbs took about
20 minutes to grind. I also chose to have the coffee packed into gold mylar
plastic which cost 20 cents more a bag so the coffee worked out to be $3/lb or
$120 for 40 lbs. I also asked for a big burlap sack which they gave me at the
discounted price of $3.
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| Roberto, the master roaster, bagging my coffee. |
I shared fresh Cuban cigars with the owner and a guy
named Ricardo who was helping out. Ricardo helped move coffee around and also
tried to sell me a coffee finca – I think his main line of business. A coffee
farmer came in and gave him some home distilled Chaparro (aguardiente?) in a
600 ml water bottle. He offered me a taste and when I said I liked it, he gave
it to me to say thanks for the cigar.
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| Coffee running through the fine grinders |
When I got home, I took a small bit of coffee that was left
over from the bagging process and ran it through my burr grinder to an espresso
powder. I put it into my Aeropress and added the water. Very fresh coffee as it
bloomed up very high. I pressed the coffee into a mug and had a sip. Very deep
strong flavours with a balanced bitterness and acid. Delicious. Then I added
some water to make an Americano and that was delicious too.
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| A rustic and charming spot in Santa Tecla |
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| What 40 lbs of coffee look like |
