The process of finding the perfect coffee plantations and production facilities is much more complicated than you would think. El Salvador has lots and lots of coffee. Our journey to production has taken us in many directions, and if it looked at incorrectly we could say we wasted a lot of time. I prefer to look at the expedition like Edison did when trying to find the right filament for his light bulb …we found a lot coffee that wasn’t for us.

Our requirements were a bit much for many of the production facilities, we want to have complete control over our coffee, how it’s roasted, how it’s ground, Blended, etc.

Growing up in the restaurant business and being a chef for many years has instilled in me a certain level of perfectionism and a desire to put out the best tasting food/beverages I can. Coffee is no exception, in fact, I love coffee, and always have. I hate bad coffee, and don’t understand how restaurants that serve good food can serve bad or mediocre coffee.

Being small at the moment made our requirements too much for the big facilities, and just too invasive for some as well. But that’s what we want and ultimately we found exactly the perfect combination of high quality coffee, and a processing facility (beneficio) that is operated by people who have a great love for, and pride in their product.

I’m not going to discuss here the many facilities here that didn’t meet our requirements, maybe some day I’ll post on the processes we went through. But now I want to talk about our coffee!!

Meet Salvador Recinos, President of UCA-PROBEX, and Director of the El Espino  cooperative. Salvador loves coffee, and he loves talking about it, showing off his facilities and his workers.
He graciously gave us the grand tour on our first visit, and was even more more hospitable when we came back to get our specifications worked out with him. We toured everything, met everyone, and where very happy with what we found.
These people love their work, they love producing the highest quality coffee and they were very excited and motivated to work with us to create our special blends.

Salvador has a great crew of people working with him at Beneficio Belen. In fact when we first arrived he wasn’t there, but our tostadoro Fabricio(Right) and his helper Billy were just getting ready to produce our custom roast and gladly worked with us through the entire process.  Fabricio did get a little nervous when I grabbed a couple of beans out of the cooling unit a little earlier than he thought I should have, but Chef’s have a pretty high tolerance for heat, and I couldn’t wait to check them out!

While we were waiting for the tostadora (roaster) to finish, we took a stroll over to the de-pulping station. Here we met Miguel, who not only keeps the equipment running smoothly, but oversees all the processes, and assembled the equipment, much of which he built himself.

Miguel is the epitome of the people here at Belen, and really of Salvadorans I’ve met, hard  working, but with a friendliness and a willingness to socialize. He took the time to show us around the de-pulping station which is really quite fascinating to watch.

Here Miguel is posing with Sule(aka Morena!!) .  Don’t be mistaken, Miguel is a hard worker, he just takes joy in what he does, and I think he was quite happy to show off his ‘baby’ (the de-pulper, not Sule!) for the ‘gringo’.

Let’s go through the process a little bit. Now obviously the beans don’t just appear here, their hand picked, and sorted based on ripeness, then weighed per person, as that is how they get paid.  We’ll post on that on our next trip to the plantation, which is not the same as the beneficio.

By the way, we use Fair Trade, well UCAPROBEX is a member of Fair Trade, we actually purchase our coffee at the full price set by each beneficio which is well above Fair Trade pricing standards. We don’t negotiate, as the prices we pay ensure that everyone is well paid from the farmers to the pickers and processors. We’re not here to exploit the people of El Salvador, but to assist them in any way we can.

The first step after unloading the coffee is washing and de-pulping. This where we first meet Miguel. The coffee cherries are fed into the holding area and washed with fresh clean water, then fed along with the water to the feeding area for the de-pulper. The picture on the left shows the ripe cherries being loaded into the de-pulper feeding area. There are six bays(Pilas) that can be run simultaneously three are for normally grown coffee and three are for certified organic.

Certified Organic coffee can never run through the normal coffee bays or equipment  and vice-versa, the organic coffee must not be processed in any way that could even touch equipment that might have traces of non-organic matter, such as certain fertilizers, pesticides, etc. The standards are very strict, but the coffee is incredible.

After the cherries get de-pulped they run along a mesh conveyer to separate the beans from the fruit(cascaras). The conveyer uses a jogging method (bouncing quickly back and forth), to allow the beans to fall through the mesh while keeping the cascaras on the conveyor to be carried away.

Here’s the de-pulper in action. This is just a short clip, we’re working on a video of the whole process subscribe to our mailing list to see the video when it’s completed.

The cascaras is used for fueling the processing facility, and the water used to wash the coffee is piped away to ferment and create a natural fertilizer. It’s all very efficient, and most importantly, even the non-organic coffee is grown and processed using mostly organic methods.

After the beans are separated out they are fed into a fermentation tank where they will be washed with fresh water and fermented for a period of time, the time varies depending on the ambient temperature, but in our climate it averages 12-15 hours.  We’re looking for a PH level around 4.6-4.8. There is debate over how much the PH affects the coffee, but this is the range used.

After we checked out the de-pulping process we headed back to the tostadora to check on the progress of our custom roast. It was just about ready and we had a chance to tweak it to our exact specifications. Fabricio was very eager to make sure he got it just right, and we frequently pulled some beans out to check the color, cracking, etc. for the perfect full city roast.  In this photo it was a little light, but it wasn’t far from done, another minute or two. I could hardly wait, but Fabricio is the expert!!

This is where Fabricio was concerned that I might burn myself as I eagerly grabbed for a sample. When he put sampler back in the tostadora I grabbed a couple of beans out of the cooling station. I’ve never been very patient. I chewed on a couple of the freshly roasted beans as we got ready to finish the roasting process. The aroma is incredible. If you’re ever here, you have to come with us on a processing day.

Finally after what seemed like forever, but was only a couple of minutes, Fabricio opened the roaster and our glorious batch starting pouring out into the cooling unit. This is really exciting to experience if you’re a coffee drinker. The sight of smoke and the smell of the coffee is overwhelming, I felt like the dad from “A Christmas Story’ waiting to eat the turkey! Fabricio gave me a handful of beans to chew on, I think he finds it a bit odd, but I’m glad to humor him. We allowed the beans to cool, and matched them to sample roasts in the tostadora facility so they can recreate our exact roast.

After the beans where cooled we took some into the office to get the grind we want. In El Salvador most coffee is ground fairly coarse, much like you would use for a French Press, I’m not sure why, though many people seem to cook it in pots and strain it, rather than with a filter drip system, so maybe that’s it. Of course we also sell, and I personally prefer whole bean coffee.

Once we found the exact grind we want, which is ideal for releasing maximum flavor in drip coffee makers it was back to the tostadora facility to grind the rest of this batch. Setting up the grinder is fairly time consuming, but you can achieve any grind desired. This is Martita in the picture above with Fabricio, she was assisting us with packaging, but she does many more things at the beneficio. She is also the hostess for visitors and does a great job of making sure you have plenty of coffee. By this time I was ready to sample the batch, and Martita made sure we didn’t have to wait long.

I’m working on learning Spanish, so I asked Fabricio if Martita meant ‘lttle Marta’ but he said, no it means Marta…my heart!!We have found more than just great coffee, we have a team of people who care not only for the coffee and living it provides for them, but care deeply for each other as well. Like I said in the beginning we looked at a lot of potential coffee, and many plantations, processing facilities, and cooperatives, but found the perfect combination of quality, care, and passion.

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