Raul Rivera
This is our seventh year buying coffee from Jorge Raul Rivera. Raul is a second generation coffee producer, based just outside the town of La Palma, in the far north-west of El Salvador, close to the border with Honduras. His farm, Finca Santa Rosa, is located at around 1550 masl on the slopes of El Pital, El Salvador’s highest point. The farm is planted mainly with the famed Salvadoran varietal Pacamara, and has produced some of the country’s highest quality coffees in recent years.
Finca Santa Rosa
Jorge Raul Rivera Sr. began growing coffee in the region around La Palma in 1979. He was one of the first to grow coffee in the area, and one of the few that stayed during El Salvador’s brutal civil war, as many others abandoned their land, sold cheap and fled into neighbouring Honduras. As El Salvador began to settle again after the war, the Riveras bought the land that would become Finca Santa Rosa, and began to grow timber, due to government subsidies aiming to help the post-war rebuilding effort.
In 2003, the Cup of Excellence came to El Salvador, a great showcase for the first few speciality coffee producers in the country. The Riveras saw a prime opportunity; if they could use the perfect conditions at Santa Rosa to produce micro-lots of high enough quality, they could fetch high prices at the Cup of Excellence auctions, making their farm highly profitable. They planted their farm with Pacamara, famed for high quality cups, and set off in pursuit of the Cup of Excellence crown.
Years of work have resulted in three overall wins, in 2014, 2017 and 2019, all with their honey-processed Pacamara. The pine from the old timber plantations has been retained as shade for the coffee, always reminding us of a Scandinavian pine forest during our visits. The pine needles capture moisture from evening mists and distribute it in the soil, while providing a source of organic material when they fall.
In this natural lot, we find deeply complex fruit notes, with orange cream liqueur and cooked red berries, followed by a finish with rich notes of dark chocolate.
