El Salvador: Finca Argentina, Yellow Pacamara, Honey

Tasting notes

In the roaster’s words

El Salvador: Finca Argentina, Yellow Pacamara, Honey This coffee is bursting with big tropical fruits! Sticky sweet mango and fresh papaya is joined by silky honeydew melon which harmonise perfectly in this balanced, clean cup. This lot very nearly didn't happen, and there's not much of it: 8kg roasted, total. Roland, our green buyer, was out in El Salvador in February, arriving at Finca Argentina just as harvest was coming to an end. The farm sits at a lower altitude than others we work with in the country, so it picks a little earlier than San José or Nejapa. He went with Mauricio Martinez to the Los Ausoles cooperative mill to cup through the season's lots, and the Yellow Pacamara was tasting great, both the natural and the washed. Roland mentioned in passing that his favourite Finca Argentina coffee from the year before had been the Bourbon Honey. Don Luis, who runs the mill, turned to Mauricio and said there was still enough Yellow Pacamara coming in to do a Honey lot, if he wanted. A few weeks later, shortly before the coffee was due to ship, Mauricio confirmed a tiny extra amount had been set aside. This is it. We bought it without tasting it. Ausoles had done good work with Honey processing the season before, this year's Yellow Pacamara was cupping brilliantly across the board, and sometimes you back the people you trust. We're very glad we did. The finished coffee went on to score 90 points on our cupping table, vindicating that leap of faith. It's grown mostly on San Jorge, the highest of the seven tablones that make up the estate, along with the upper reaches of the tablones next to it. San Jorge itself is under two hectares, sitting between 1,300 and 1,360 metres, planted at roughly 5,000 trees to the hectare. As recently as 2009 it was entirely Bourbon. The Yellow Pacamara went in in 2018 and it's all that grows there now. Altitude, aspect, soil and the geothermal quirks of a landscape that still bubbles and steams in places all give each tablón its own personality, and this upper section is where the Martinez family put some of their favourite trees. Yellow Pacamara started as a natural mutation of the red-fruited Pacamara. Around 2004, a security guard called Santos was walking the Red Pacamara field at Finca Limoncillo in Nicaragua and noticed three trees ripening yellow instead of red. The Mierisch family isolated them, saved the seed and slowly built up enough plant stock to grow it properly. The seedlings at San Jorge came from that same

Notes

Tiny 8kg roasted lot from Finca Argentina, grown mostly on San Jorge, the highest of the estate's seven tablones.