6 La Pacaya, 89.32 - El Salvador 2021

Our story begins in 2012, during the height of the coffee rust crisis in El Salvador. Our family farm which has been with us for 5 generations was in danger, as rust ravaged our plants, we saw how friends and colleagues were forced to abandon or sell their farms. We naturally considered this for a moment, however after careful consideration we realized this was not an option; doing this would mean abandoning workers that have been with our family for generations, the land could be urbanized causing an environmental disaster in Juayua, and we would lose part of our family identity. The only way out of this was deep diving into coffee, change our traditional growing practices, choosing the right varietals, and working with the best agronomists in the country.
With the help of our friends at Lean Coffee Management, we managed to turn things around. We renovated the farm with plants that were suited not only to rust, but the changing environment due to global warming, we incorporated technology like satellite spectral geo-mapping, mechanized farm maintenance, and introduced policies that would protect the land for years of sustainable coffee production.
Our farm was safe, worker's jobs were assured, and we gained an immense knowledge on how to do things right, optimizing resources and yielding a consistently high-quality coffee. We eventually got bitten by the coffee bug and knew there was more to do in this space, there was a world of exotic varietals with subtle yet intricate flavors that spellbound our tastebuds, and we wanted to get into that. Our family farm was not suited for those varietals for environmental and altitude reasons, and this is where La Pacaya® comes in.
La Pacaya® Story
In 2014 while researching and tasting exotic varietals we ended up in Panama, in search of the mythical Geisha variety. We started a friendship with the father of Panamanian geisha Francisco Serrracín who gracefully sold us seeds to grow back in El Salvador; there was a problem however, we lacked the proper land to grow our geisha seeds. After thorough soil, environmental, logistical and viability analysis we ended up settling on an undisclosed plot of land 1,700-2,000 meters above sea level in the vicinity of our family farm, it was ideal for our dream of an exotic coffee varietal garden. The land used to be a pacaya farm, which birthed the name of the farm.
We doubled down on the same techniques and technologies we learned and applied on our family farm, recording everything with an obsessive attention to detail. In the years to come we selected the most suitable and best tasting plants and symbiotically adapted them to the lush, foggy and harsh but ideal environment of the farm. The result was an identifiably traditional Panamanian geisha with a unique Salvadoran profile that perfectly accentuates the rich nutrients of the mountain.
Geisha is our main varietal now, but we're experimenting with other exotic varietals from around the world that could eventually compete in COE. We pride ourselves in bringing something new and delicious to the specialty coffee world and we hope our Geisha will captivate your palate with its unique twist to the Geisha varietal.
Geisha picking & Processing
Our process for selecting the best beans starts by identifying the internal sucrose levels, beans that score 25º on the Brix Scale are handpicked for their ripeness. The beans are further filtered through sieves for size uniformity, floated in water to revalidate sucrose levels and dried before being anaerobically fermented for 48 hours in barrels manufactured and designed by us.
The beans are later dried inside a greenhouse for a controlled and stable temperature of 30ºc ±5ºc. The temperature is checked every 30min with an infrared thermometer and shaded if the mass temperature exceeds our parameters. The beans are dried until they reach 10.5% humidity and packed in Grainpro bags for storage.