ABOUT THIS COFFEE:
Finca San Antonio is a family farm in the hills of Chalatenango, run by Marta Yaneth Lemus and her husband Johny. Her parents started it, the two of them have it now, and their children are coming up behind them. They have planted shade trees across the farm to keep the coffee cool and slow it down, and anything already standing gets left alone.
The fruit is picked ripe and pulped the same day, left to rest overnight, then dried in the sun on raised beds for two or three weeks. Ask them what they are proudest of and the answer is the work the farm gives people in the villages around it.
Chalatenango is the coolest, highest and most northerly corner of El Salvador, and for years nobody went looking for coffee there. That changed in 2007, when a coffee from Chalatenango won the Cup of Excellence, the competition and auction that puts a country's best lots in front of the whole coffee world. People have been going up there to look ever since.
