About This Coffee
Isauro Baleria Solares Jacobo cultivates unique and flavorful coffees at Finca La Cabaña. This lot is comprised of Pacamara variety cherry. Pacamara is prized for its large beans. Combined with Isauro’s innovative Anaerobic Fully washed processing, this coffee is sweet and flavorful with grape and cocoa.
Isauro is a partner in Cooperative Nuevo Sendero, a cooperative that certifies Finca La Cabaña with its Rainforest Alliance certification.
Cultivation
Coffee is cultivated under shade trees. Isauro receives agronomic management advice through his cooperative membership. Thanks to the ideal microclimate around the farm, Isauro is organic-by-default and uses only organic fertilizer to supplement tree health. In addition to coffee, Isauro also cultivates bananas, avocadoes, macadamia nuts and jocote. He also sustains a bee population of over 1.6 million honey bees that pollinate trees and produce honey, pollen and wax.
Harvest & Post-Harvest
Cherry is selectively hand-picked. Ripeness is checked with Brix content (sugar content) to ensure only ripe cherry is selected and processed.
This lot was processed using Anaerobic Fully washed methods to innovatively add value to the coffee and improve overall cup quality. Once selected, ripe, red cherry is pulped and fermented in hermetically-sealed barrels for 24 hours. The barrel is outfitted with a valve that enables excess oxygen and carbon dioxide to escape while keeping the environment anaerobic for fermentation.
Following fermentation, parchment is removed, washed in clean water and laid on raised beds to dry.
About Pacamara
The Institute for Coffee Research (ISIC) created the Pacamara hybrid in El Salvador in the 1950s. The variety is a cross of Pacas (a Bourbon mutation) and Maragogype. Pacamara is relatively short with high productivity and is prized for its large cherries. Maragogype is a natural mutation of Typica that’s known for especially large beans. Pacamara's name comes from the first 4 letters of each parent.
Coffee in Guatemala
Guatemala boasts a variety of growing regions and conditions that produce spectacular coffees. Today, the country is revered as a producer of some of the most flavorful and nuanced cups worldwide. We are proud to work with several exceptional in-country partners to bring these coffees to market.
The Guatemalan coffee industry experienced a major setback with the 2010 appearance of Coffee Leaf Rust (CLR) in Latin America. The epidemic peaked in severity in 2012, and though CLR continues to affect some farms, Guatemala continues to produce high-quality, record-breaking coffees. In 2017, new and varied processing methods pushed prices at the Guatemalan Cup of Excellence contest to record highs.
The quality of coffee being produced in Guatemala is increasing, overall, due to the diversity of the industry’s producers. There are more and more small holder farmers producing exceptional coffee at high altitudes. Cooperatives are becoming more appealing to so many smallholders because they often offer farmers financing and other support for improving their farming and processing and are frequently able to offer higher prices for cherry than middlemen. Many cooperatives have initiated quality improvement training for farmer members and are becoming more adept at helping members market their coffee as specialty.