Coffee

We’re at 1,000–1,300 meters here in Perquín, around 3–4,000 feet, so the conditions are very good for growing coffee.

Since the early 1800s coffee’s been grown successfully in El Salvador. But in Honduras and Guatemala the production is much more advanced and there they sell more of their coffee to buyers capable of reselling it to Starbucks, Trader Joe’s, or one of the local independent retailers of gourmet coffees in your town. They grew good coffee in Peru, but not where I lived when I worked there—a desert at sea level. There you were as likely to get instant coffee as brewed coffee if you ordered a cup in a restaurant. The coffee is very tasty here in Perquín but we still have a ways to go to bring our coffees up to the standards required by the previously mentioned buyers.

Why is that? Mostly it’s the processing of the beans. The growers here have access to the same coffee that growers plant in Honduras, which, after all, is only 32 km from Perquín. However, the manner in which the coffee is harvested, dried, and roasted, and the quantity of beans produced by an individual grower or cooperative make all the difference.

As you can see from the picture below, the plants are beautiful—rich, dark green leaves which in May begin to produce “uvas”, what we call “cherries,” inside of which reside the coffee beans. The rainy season begins in May in El Salvador and so the coffee flourishes for seven months and in November comes the harvest. But fine coffees begin to distinguish themselves from mediocre coffees long before the harvest.

For nearly 200 years, producers in El Salvador grew arabica, an “indio” or wild, native coffee with a rich, full flavor. But the fact that they mainly grew that one variety led to their eventual downfall. Because they neglected to genetically differentiate their plants, diseases adapted and spread. Eventually one plant disease, “la roya” (leaf rust), wiped out virtually the entire Salvadoran coffee industry. 

These skinny, white, naked sticks were formerly coffee trees.

The growers are just beginning to emerge from this crisis. They’ve planted disease-resistant strains, especially “cuscataleco,” which supposedly comes from the Salvadoran department of Cuscatlán but really originated in Honduras, where it was bred to resist leaf rust. Leaf rust had also decimated the Honduran coffee plantations. Another resistant variety is lempira, a tasty hybrid readily available in gourmet shops in the U.S. However, these varieties produce for only about 20 years, whereas some of the arabica trees destroyed by leaf rust were 100 years old. Also, unless the growers genetically diversify when they plant, some other disease will gain a foothold and again devastate their plantations of cuscataleco and lempira.

Genetic diversification doesn’t necessarily require that you grow several varieties of coffee. You could grow 4 or 5 clones of one variety and graft your plants. A graft offers the advantage of a robust rootstock plant—disease resistant, good root system—and a scion that produces flavorful beans but that if grown by itself would be disease-prone or otherwise unsuitable to local growing conditions.

And if you diversify and if you care for your plants well and fertilize and fumigate with chemical or organic pesticides and fungicides, are you guaranteed a good harvest and coffee beans that will bring top dollar? No, you’re not even close; not yet.

Perhaps the biggest mistake that growers make is poor quality control at the time of harvest. This part shouldn't really be that hard. All you have to do is pick the red cherries and shun the green cherries. The red cherries are the ripe cherries and the ones that produce the most flavorful beans. However, there's pressure on the grower to pick as much coffee as possible and there's a desire on the part of the seasonal pickers to pick as many cherries as possible since they get paid by the sack. So what too frequently occurs is that red cherries get mixed in with green cherries, which assures that the entire harvest, when processed, yields beans with a poor appearance—small, light-colored, broken beans mixed with large, whole, dark beans—and more importantly a compromised flavor.

The drying of the cherries is also a step that must be carried out carefully and correctly. The cherries need to be spread evenly on drying patios or African “camas”—raised beds; they need to be kept out of the rain; they need to be turned at regular intervals; bugs and animals need to be kept away. The beans can then be sold as “oro”—“gold” so-called, due to their color: the coffee beans before they’re roasted—or, in order to fetch a retail rather that wholesale price, can be roasted first. Roasting is an extremely exacting process and most coffee is ruined at this stage—the equivalent of fumbling the ball on the one yard-line. 

Here in Perquín much of the roasting is carried out in a decidedly “artisanal” fashion. In larger quantities the beans are sometimes roasted in roasters that resemble something you’d see at a backyard pig roast in Iowa—an oil drum cut in half with a mechanism inside for turning the beans continuously. Alternatively, small producers frequently roast beans on a comal—a flat, round ceramic griddle. If done correctly, the coffee roasted thusly is delicious. Imagine walking out to Prudencio’s finca in Pueblo Viejo, watching Prude’s wife roast beans before your very eyes, seeing Prude grind the beans by hand in a big, silver funnel-shaped mill, then taking the coffee home and brewing it! But this process can’t be carried out on a large scale and the results are unpredictable when Prude and his wife aren’t in charge.

And if you've managed to dodge all the bullets up to this point in the process you're still not done. You have to produce at least a container—around 250 sacks or 33,000 pounds—of beans or an international buyer won't even talk to you.

How does one reach that level of production? Most producers in Perquín own 1–5 manzanas of land. (A manzana is .7 hectares. A hectare is 2.47 acres.) On one manzana of land it’s possible to cram 1,200 or more coffee plants. One coffee plant, once it’s three years old, produces about 2 pounds of “oro”—dried but not roasted beans—a year. That means that one would need to be raising, harvesting and drying the yield of 1,100 plants (about what would grow on a manzana) in order to produce a metric ton of beans (2,200 pounds). It takes fifteen metric tons to fill a container. So realistically the only way farmers can hope to reach that level of production iis by organizing themselves into cooperatives. I’m working with a cooperative here in Perquín—La Asociación Cooperativa de Productores Agrícolas Cafés Especiales de Perquín (The Perquín Cooperative of Producers of Specialty Coffees). Let’s hope the number of integers in their bank balance someday matches the number of letters in their name.

So the next time you savor a cup of fine coffee at Northampton Coffee or whatever the name of the source of the best cup of coffee in your town happens to be, give a thought to where it came from and who produced it and why it tastes so good. And don't worry about running out; somewhere a cargo container full of the same beans is waiting for you.