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.

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 Nicaraguan stock. These trees are cousins of the Limoncillo Yellow Pacamara you may well have had from us before.

Curiously, it behaves quite differently in El Salvador. In Nicaragua the varietal has a reputation for being hard work: hungry for nutrients, prone to disease, stingy with yields. The team at Finca Argentina report the opposite, and rate it for its productivity and hardiness. Same genetics, very different ground beneath them.

Honey processing sits between washed and natural. The skin comes off the cherry after picking, and the sticky, sugar-rich mucilage stays on while the beans dry. It's a tightrope walk that demands constant turning and a close eye on the weather. Los Ausoles, the cooperative mill in Ahuachapán that handles everything coming off the farm, has proved reliably good at it. Done properly you get the clean definition of a washed coffee with an extra seam of sweetness and texture running through it. Here it's turned the fruit all the way up without muddying a thing.

We've been buying from Finca Argentina since 2008, when a sample sent by Mauricio's son Alejandro landed with us in Stafford. The farm was struggling then. San Jorge's own records have the harvest ending February 2007 coming in at 7.8 quintales per manzana, less than half what it had managed two years before. Eighteen harvests later, it's one of our favourite arrivals of the year.

• Country: El Salvador
• District: Ahuachapán
• Municipality: Ahuachapán
• Nearest city: Turin
• Farm: Finca Argentina
• Producer: Mauricio Martinez
• Dry mill: Los Ausoles
• Elevation: 1,300 to 1,360 m.a.s.l.
• Variety: Yellow Pacamara
• Processing method: Honey
• GPS: 13°56'29.4"N 89°47'04.1"W

Tasting notes: Honeydew melon, mango, papaya.

Cup of Excellence Cupping Scores

• Clean cup: 6.5
• Sweetness: 7
• Acidity: 6
• Mouthfeel: 7
• Flavour: 6
• Aftertaste: 6
• Balance: 7
• Overall: 6.5
• Correction: +36
• Total: 90

If you'd like to find out more about how we score coffees, make sure to read our blog post “What Do Coffee Cupping Scores Actually Mean?” and if you'd like to try cupping yourself, we've got a guide to that too! What is Coffee Cupping.

Medium dark. We take this one through the gap and let it develop a little, watching the heat closely and dropping well before second. Honey processed Yellow Pacamara brings a lot of natural sweetness with it already, and that's where the extra development earns its keep: it rounds the mango and papaya out rather than sharpening them, and keeps the honeydew melon soft and silky instead of letting it turn sharp or vegetal. Push past this point and second crack starts stripping out the fruit that makes this lot worth having. Drop it in time and the sweetness stays intact, clean through to the finish.