El Salvador Menendez

This is a comforting yet delicious coffee. It has a creamy, butterscotch sweetness, with flavours of orange and red grape.

Miguel Menendez Sr. manages the family’s coffee farms in three generations of ancestral footsteps, and with the long experience, the family farms and process station are state of the art. The farm Las Delicias is located in the Ahuachapán region in western El Salvador. The farm is 35 hectares, extending from 1300 to 1900 meters above sea level. Coffee is planted up to 1750 meters, since above that the temperatures will be too low to grow coffee. At the top of the farm, there are eight hectares of native forest providing habitat for numerous animal species.

Together with their sons Miguel Jr. and Guillermo the family handles the whole chain, from picked cherries to exported beans. They wash, ferment, dry, sort, pack and export the coffee with full control and transparency. It’s easy to call out the joy and pride of having this coffee from the Menendez family in our assortment. It har been about 15 years since we started buying coffee from them and this really is the role model of how coffee should be traded. As we have grown, our volumes from Menendez have done the same. At a time when more and more producers abandoned their farms, they have not only managed but also been able to invest and build for the future.

At Las Delicias, the majority of coffee is Bourbon, with about 10% being Pacamara and other experimental varieties. Since 2010, the farm is certified as “Denomination of Origin”, which sets up standards for environmental protection, sustainable coffee production as well as social aspects for workers etc. The Menendez family is using this as a foundation to manage the farm in an environmentally friendly way with modern techniques to produce high quality coffee that’s sustainable in the future. The recent years with outbreaks of Coffee Leaf Rust, a pandemic and crisis in the coffee market have been trying for all coffee producers. Despite this, the constant hard work on the farm has meant that the family has been able to continue producing fantastic coffee year after year!

Origin: El Salvador
Region: Ahuachapán
Producer: Menedez family
Farm: Las Delicias
Altitude: 1700 m.a.s.l.
Variety: Pacamara
Coffee process: Washed

Taste Notes: Orange, Butterscotch, Red Grape