El Salvador - Mauricio Salaverria
Regular price $24.00
Well-rounded, silky, rich
Graham crust, malted chocolate,
baked apple, green grape, soft berries
Finca Himilaya is a 60-hectare farm owned by Mauricio A. Salaverria.
As a renowned coffee producer among high-end international specialty roasters, his coffees have won several top 10 placings in the prestigious El Salvador Cup of Excellence.
The Salaverria Family first immigrated to El Salvador from Basque country, Spain in the mid 1800s. Finca Himilaya, the original farm has been cultivated since 1875, making Mauricio a 6th generation coffee producer. Mauricio and his father were among the first people in El Salvador to produce specialty coffee. Their early focus on high-quality, particularly natural process lots are what Finca Himilaya is now famous for.
Finca Himilaya cultivates much of their coffee under shade grown conditions under a loose canopy of cypress, pine and Inga trees. This shade provides habitats for a variety of fauna and improves the qualities of the coffee cherries. During harvest time, the cherries are hand-picked at optimal ripeness, a laborious process that ensures the highest quality of each cherry, and are processed at Mauricio’s nearby Divisadero micromill.
In Mauricio’s own words when asked what his favorite coffee producing method is:
“I would have to say natural, because it’s the most challenging. I come back to the naturals because there’s so many variables - the temperature, the weather, the rain, the sun, the clouds, the movement of the coffee - but it all starts with perfect picking of the cherries. The first five days is very essential, and after that is the slow dry. You cannot hurry a natural. On average we dry for 23 days, it might go up 5 more days or 6 more days, but if it’s super hot then we might slow them down, and put them in a volcano shape and cover them to keep them hanging without drying them more. So it depends, we have to monitor that, and the person who is in charge of that is very important, I find. They need to know the climate situation and how each coffee is progressing.”
Please enjoy the fruits of Mauricio’s efforts!