About the El Sunzita, Washed Red Bourbon, El Salvador
Flavour Description: An aroma of milk chocolate. This is a mature and well-balanced cup profile, with a low to medium malic-like acidity of red apple. Flavour notes of fresh hazelnut and gala apple, with a red grape aftertaste. The body is light to medium with a mouthfeel reminding of red apple juice.
Colour: Red
Category: Comfortable
Producer: Mauricio Ortiz and Mary Ortiz
Region: El Pasti in the Santa Ana region
Varietal: Red Bourbon
Harvest: January 2022
Altitude: 1400 meters above sea level
Processing: Fully-washed
Price transparency: The FOB price paid for this coffee was 3.50 US$ /lb.
When we met Mary and Mauricio Ortiz they only delivered coffee to the local mill. They are a kind, and very driven in producing the best coffee they can. So of course we wanted to work with them directly and improve the cup quality even more through our teamwork. Maurizio is a highly skilled agronomist and is doing phenomenal work on this. For a few years, we are getting the four varietals grown at the farm kept separated for us. Drop Coffee is the only ones buying the coffee sourced directly from the farm El Sunzita. The coffee they produce that we are not buying still goes to the local mill, El Sunza, and gets blended with several other producers in the area processed there.
Mary received the Coffee grower of the year award, from 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. This is the Red Bourbon. The taste profile is mature with notes of red apples and fresh hazelnuts.
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 easily soluble 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 a small bit of El Sunza, El Sunzita and their aim was to process higher quality coffee and sell it separately. And that is when we met the couple Ortiz and found a match in how we wished to work.
We’re now happy to have the coffee from El Sunzita at Drop Coffee, for the seventh 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. Every year we are buying more and more volume.
The FOB price paid for this coffee was 3.50US$/lb.
