Not quite 2,000 miles away from home, Lucia de Ortiz wasn’t without her favorite cup of coffee Thursday morning during a visit to Topeka.
She loves this brew: a little sweet and citrusy with hints of plum — a flavor so pure that to attempt adding milk or sugar would be unthinkable. Ortiz knows the beans this coffee came from well — maybe they even came from some of the plants she hollered at when she climbed her family’s sloping El Salvadorian farm. During growing season, she climbs the mountain to yell at the plants, like a coach trying to get the most of her players.
“You have to go to the mountains,” she explained of the farm her husband’s family has had since 1886. “You go there, and you shout at them. My husband says, ‘You’re crazy.’”
This does not deter Ortiz. She tells the beans she doesn’t like how they’re growing. They need to get fat. When they do well, she complements them.
These plants, which can produce coffee for a hundred years, are the lifeblood of the family farm Las Mercedes in southern El Salvador. So, if it takes a little cajoling to make the plants perform, Ortiz is up for it.
On Thursday, Ortiz stopped at PT’s Coffee’s Barrington Village shop. Her coffee, El Pepinal 1, was brewed and she chatted with customers.
Finca Las Mercedes won first place in the 2006 El Salvador Cup of Excellence with a record-breaking score. The competition allows roasters, like PT’s, to seek out and then bid on the highest quality coffees.
“It’s exposed a whole different part of the country to great coffees no one ever knew existed before,” said PT’s co-owner Jeff Taylor.
Only that year, PT’s bought the No. 2 coffee from the El Salvador Cup of Excellence.
“The next year, Lucia calls, ‘Why did you not buy my coffee,’” Taylor said. “I was like um…”
The coffee is now a regular at PT’s, which buys the most coveted of the farm’s beans — those that come from the highest part of the mountain. At the higher altitude, it takes longer for the beans to ripen to the perfect red shade. That adds to the flavor profile of the coffee.
With the 420-acre farm’s success, Ortiz said the family works to benefit the surrounding community in Santiago de Maria, El Salvador. That ranges from providing medical care to workers, to donating supplies to the local school, to incorporating environmentally-friendly practices. The berries from which the beans are extracted are turned into compost, and the farm uses rain water to supply its needs, leaving the water that runs off the mountain for the residents below.
Once the beans leave the farm, Ortiz trusts PT’s to roast them to perfection.
“He knows the coffee,” she said of Taylor, who visits the farm around harvest time. “He knows how to bring the sweetness, the citric out.”
www.cafelasmercedes.com
