El Sunzita, Red Bourbon, El Salvador 2019
About the Coffee
Flavour Description: Medium bodied mature cup profile with a smooth mouthfeel like red apple juice. Tasting like a milk chocolate bar with a hint of fresh dates and a malic like acidity of red apple.
Colour: Light red
Category: Comfortable
Producer: Mauricio Ortiz and Mary Ortiz
Region: El Pasti in the Santa Ana region
Varietal: Red Bourbon
Harvest: February-March 2019
Altitude: 1400 meters above sea level
Processing: Fully-washed
We have been working with Mary and Mauricio Ortiz for many years, they are kind, and very driven in producing the best coffee they can, and it is a treat to roast and brew their coffee every year. We are the only ones buying the coffee sourced directly from the farm El Sunzita. The coffee they produce that we are not buying goes to the local mill, El Sunza, and gets blended with several other producers in the area processed there. We have bought that blend before, but have been working directly with the Ortiz couple for the last few years and every year they produce even more high-end speciality coffee.
Mary received the Coffee grower of the year award in 2018, by the agricultural minister of El Salvador, because of the innovative process that they use at their farm. El Sunzita is a great example of driven producers that are putting in the extra work to achieve higher quality, also how small-scale producers and roasters can work together for higher quality. Year after year we are getting more varietals separated. This is the Red Bourbon. The taste profile is mature with notes of milk chocolate, fresh dates, and red apple juice.
About the farm El Sunzita
Mary and Mauricio were given their current piece of land through Mauricio's family, 30 years ago when they got married and started to grow coffee on the plot soon thereafter. Mauricio is an agronomist and Mary is working with admin and business. Step by step they have built an incredibly beautiful farm on their land. Today they have built a nursery to be able to strengthen weaker plants, installed a small pulper to be able to experiment on different processing. Their grown-up kids are getting more and more involved as well.
On their 16 hectares, they now have a beautiful nursery and a small scale pulper. The altitude of El Sunzita is one of the lowest altitudes coffees we are buying in El Salvador, at 1400 meters above sea level. this makes the coffee easy souluble in the brew.
Mauricio as an agronomist and producer is consulting other producers with agronomy too. At El Sunzita he is working as steady and organic as he can, focusing on the three S’s; Soil, Sun and Shade. By covering the area with the coffee trees with shading trees, sending soil on tests readings and creating their own fertilizers. On the new plants, they have been focusing on building stronger roots of the plants, for three years they've applied biota and are also making fertilizers from the coffee pulp.
Drop Coffee and El Sunzita
The farm belongs to the mountain pitch El Sunza, with a total of 140 hectares of coffee farms, owned by Mauricio's brother. In 2015, Mary and Mauricio decided they wanted to produce the coffee from their farm individually. They named their farm as a small bit of El Sunza, El Sunzita and their aim was to process higher quality coffee and sell it separately.
We’re now happy to have the coffee from El Sunzita at Drop Coffee, for the fifth year in a row working with the couple. Step by step we’ve been growing the cooperation. Over the last years, our cooperation has given us the opportunity to have the varietals separated for us which means that we can offer these separately to you.
