El Salvador Atiquizaya Tabi

This lot is from Finca Miravalles, where we chose to source the majority of our El Salvador coffees this past harvest. Miravalles is owned by the Duarte family, and is located in Apaneca, Ahuachapan, not too far from the Santa Ana volcano. You can see the nearby town of Atiquizaya from the farm slopes. Miravalles is about 1500 meters above sea level. It's part of a much larger group of coffee plots, a few of them demarcated by cultivar separations, and the larger plots a mix of cultivars. Duarte has kept his farm planted in Bourbon and Pacamara for the most part, despite the susceptibility to leaf rust. Many farmers are replanting with disease resistant varietals, but Luis Duarte has chosen to continue with these cultivars because of the commonly held belief that they taste superior to most disease resistant hybrids available and manages to prevent leaf rust and fungal outbreaks with good farm practices (proper space between plants, regular pruning, cleaning beneath the trees, directive spraying, etc). Here lies one of the exceptions, a lot separation of the disease-resistant "Tabi". This cross between Bourbon, Typica, and Timor Hybrid, created at Colombia's agricultural research institute ("CENICAFE") was produced to have the best of both worlds: disease resistance, and good cup quality. These coffees are then kept separate throughout the milling process, sold as an individual micro lots as opposed to being lost to large blends.