Taste of El Salvador El Salvador coffee planting history and graded quality of El Salvador coffee

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Coffee palate: El Salvador's bourbon coffee is famous for its sweetness and balanced taste, with pleasant supple acidity and overall harmony.

El Salvador began to grow coffee commercially in the 1850s and became the fourth largest coffee producer in the world in 1880, becoming an important source of economy and a major export crop in El Salvador. But the civil war broke out in the 1980s, which reduced coffee production, and the market was also looking for other sources of coffee exports.

However, the civil war had a positive impact on the quality of coffee in El Salvador, which did not change the original species of coffee into improved varieties with high yield, as in neighboring countries in the same period, but maintained a high proportion of primary bourbon-planted coffee trees in the country. in addition, El Salvador's volcanic ash-based soil is rich in minerals, making the coffee produced excellent taste and great potential, but there is less organic matter in the soil. So Salvadoran farmers will use the pulp residue of treated coffee beans or the organic matter under coffee trees as fertilizer to make up for the lack of organic matter in the soil and make coffee trees more capable of producing coffee beans with mixed taste.

El Salvador still sometimes uses the elevation of coffee growth to classify coffee, which has nothing to do with its quality:

Strictly High Grown (SHG) over 1200 m above sea level

High Grown (HG) over 900m above sea level

Central Standard is over 600m above sea level

In 1949, Don Alberto Pacas discovered the bourbon variety Pacas on his estate, and then crossed with Maragogype elephant beans to cultivate the famous Pacamara species.

Reference:

James Hoffmann- The World Atlas of Coffee: from Beans to Brewing: Coffees Explored, Explained and Enjoyed (2016)