This is In My Mug coffee number 928, roasted and posted to subscribers on Friday 21st August 2026.
Think of freshly brewed black tea with a slice of lemon and white sugar stirred through. A warming spoonful of nutmeg comes in on the finish of this comforting, sweet cup.
This week's coffee comes from a farm we've been buying from every single year since 2008, and it's a varietal that turns up on very few bags. Both of those things are worth talking about, so settle in.
A sample in the post
Some farms find you through trade shows or auction lots. Finca Argentina found us because someone put coffee in an envelope and hoped for the best.
The estate was bought in 1967 by Dr Luis Guillermo Martinez, and it quickly became his favourite of the farms he owned. It produced beautifully for decades. But by the time his son Mauricio inherited it in 2008, cherry yields had dropped a long way from where they'd once been, and Mauricio wasn't sure what to do with it.
That's when his son Alejandro stepped in. Alé had recently moved back to El Salvador after working as a city banker in New York, and while he looked for work he started helping his father with the family's business interests. Digging through old paperwork, he found something worth acting on: the farm's coffee had been classified for a Q auction back in 2005. The quality was in there. Someone had to go and find it again.
So Alé and his London-based cousin began doing the least glamorous but most effective thing in specialty coffee: posting green samples to any roaster who might take a look. One of those samples landed with us in 2008. We liked what we tasted. We've been buying ever since.
Eighteen harvests
The origin story is a good one. The eighteen years since are the part we're proud of.
Specialty coffee talks a great deal about long-term relationships, and rightly so. But the version that actually matters is turning up again the following year, and the year after that, and the one after that. Through good harvests and difficult ones. Through weather that behaves and weather that doesn't. Buying a couple of crops from a farm and then moving on is easy. Coming back for eighteen consecutive seasons lets a farm plan, invest and take risks on new varietals.
Over those years the relationship has become properly personal. Alé is a good friend of ours. He appears in Steve Leighton's book Coffeeography: The Coffee Producers, and has joined Steve on speaking tours to talk honestly with audiences about what coffee farming actually involves.
The family setup has shifted over time. Mauricio and Alejandro both live in Canada now, but Mauricio still owns Finca Argentina and oversees it remotely, relying on his farm manager and the on-site team for day-to-day decisions and visiting El Salvador regularly to check in. Mauricio's daughter Beatrix, who hadn't previously been involved in coffee at all, is now stepping in to help with the family business.
Roland was out there most recently in February, arriving as harvest at Finca Argentina was winding down. The farm sits at a lower altitude than other producers we work with in El Salvador, which shifts its picking window earlier than San José or Nejapa. He travelled with Mauricio to the Los Ausoles mill to cup through the season's available lots, and buying this Washed Centroamericano was an easy yes.
Read the full Martinez family producer story →
On the farm
You'll find Finca Argentina near the town of Turin, in the Ahuachapán department of El Salvador. It sits in the Apaneca-Ilamatepec mountain range around 1,300 metres above sea level, surrounded by natural hot springs. This is volcanic country, and the landscape makes sure you know it.
The Apaneca-Ilamatepec range accounts for roughly 60% of El Salvador's coffee production, thanks to volcanic soil and the climate that comes with the altitude. Nearby, the Los Ausoles geothermal field covers some 20 square kilometres and contains over 130 active features: mud pots, fumaroles and steam vents, including the largest geothermal vent in Central America. The dry mill that processes this coffee takes its name from that landscape.
The farm's 35 hectares are divided into seven distinct areas, known as tablones. Each has its own character, shaped by altitude, aspect, soil and the small peculiarities of microclimate that come with local volcanic activity. Over the years the team have worked out which varietals thrive where, tablón by tablón, season by season.
This week's coffee comes from the Guachipelin tablón, six hectares replanted in 2016 with H1 (Centroamericano), Yellow Bourbon, Icatu and a small amount of SL-28.
Trust in the team
One detail about how Finca Argentina is run has always stuck with us. Throughout the growing season, individual workers are given a lot of responsibility over pruning and managing trees.
On many farms, pruning is regimented, every other tree gets a skeleton prune in this section, and so on down the rows. At Finca Argentina, those decisions are left much more to the knowledge of the staff, who assess plant by plant as they work through an area and decide what each tree needs. Get pruning wrong and you can ruin a tree's production for years, so this takes an enormous amount of trust. It's only possible because the farm retains and develops its workers' skills over the long term.
That investment extends beyond the farm gate. The Martinez family employ 50 people during harvest and 30 for the rest of the year. They contribute labour and materials to improve infrastructure in surrounding towns, and grow 25 kg of corn annually for each worker. They're also pushing further into ecological management, using compost and other organic inputs to minimise environmental impact, and intercropping beans to enrich the soil. The results show up in the land's biodiversity and, happily, in the cup.
Centroamericano H1: the fun one
Then there's the varietal itself.
Centroamericano turns up on very few bags, and it comes out of some of the most ambitious plant breeding coffee has done in decades. If you like trying something new, this is a lovely one to have in your hands.
To give it its full name, Centroamericano H1 F1 Hybrid is a Sarchimor. The Catimors and Sarchimors are a large group of varietals created by crossing Arabica varietals with the Timor Hybrid, a naturally occurring Arabica-Robusta cross discovered nearly a century ago in Timor. In the case of Centroamericano H1, its parents are T5296 (a Timor Hybrid crossed with Villa Sarchi) and Rume Sudan, an Ethiopian landrace that breeders reach for when they want cup quality in a cross.
H1 belongs to a new generation of F1 hybrids, developed through collaboration between CIRAD in France, CATIE in Costa Rica, PROMECAFE, World Coffee Research and other partners. After years of trials it was released to Central American farmers around 2010, with a clear goal: combine high yields, disease resistance and cup quality in a single plant.
It has since spread across the region. The plant grows quickly, resists leaf rust and yields heavily. Trials have shown H1 producing 22 to 47% more than traditional varieties. Hybrid vigour pushes that as high as 30 to 50% in some cases, and brings fruit on earlier. For a farmer replanting a section of land, cherry in the second year rather than the third or fourth can make a real difference.
And the cup? A Nicaraguan lot scored 90.5 at the 2017 Cup of Excellence and took a Presidential Award.
Read our full guide to the Centroamericano H1 varietal →
Why this one in particular
We taste a lot of coffee. We taste Centroamericano from a number of the farms we work with, and the H1 from Finca Argentina is consistently the finest example of this varietal we encounter anywhere.
It's earned a permanent place on our offer list because it holds its own comfortably alongside the farm's other varietals year after year. For the Martinez family, H1 is both practical insurance against leaf rust and a coffee that stands up on the cupping table. For us, it's one of the coffees we look forward to tasting every February.
New to Centroamericano? This is about the best introduction you'll get.
Traceability
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Country: El Salvador
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Region: Apaneca-Ilamatepec
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Department: Ahuachapán
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Municipality: Ahuachapán
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Nearest town: Turin
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Farm: Finca Argentina
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Producer: The Martinez Family
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Dry mill: Beneficio Los Ausoles
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Elevation: 1,300 m.a.s.l.
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Variety: Centroamericano (H1)
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Processing method: Washed
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Relationship since: 2008
Cupping scores
Cupping notes: Black tea, white sugar, lemon, nutmeg.
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Clean Cup: 6/8
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Sweetness: 6.5/8
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Acidity: 6/8
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Mouthfeel: 6/8
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Flavour: 6.5/8
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Aftertaste: 6.5/8
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Balance: 6.5/8
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Overall: 6.5/8
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Correction: +36
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Total: 86.5/100
If you'd like to find out more about how we score coffees, have a read of What Do Coffee Cupping Scores Actually Mean?, and if you fancy trying cupping yourself, we've got a guide to that too: What is Coffee Cupping.
Roasting information
Medium dark, and we mean it. This one runs through first crack and keeps going, right to the edge of second - further than we'd usually take a washed Central American. That extra stretch is where the sweetness comes from. Hold a coffee there and the sugars caramelise properly, which is what gives you that white sugar quality and the warm nutmeg on the finish. The trick is knowing when to stop. Push much past that point and you'd lose the delicate stuff, the black tea and the lemon lift that keep the cup from turning heavy. So we ease off just before. Darker in the bag than you might expect, brighter in the cup than it looks.
