Stay Awhile | Balam

Roaster Notes:

I could sip this coffee all day on espresso. The fudgey, chocolatey body comes out strong on pour over and drip brew methods, but something beautiful happens when you pull Balam on espresso. These golden acidities come out to play like a clementine dipped in dark chocolate and sandwiched inside of a gooey stroopwafel. This is our new, main workhorse coffee for good reason. It pairs impeccably well with milk..the Baker’s chocolate body holds the base of any beverage while those golden notes softly ripple out in the linger. The effect of this glorious coffee with milk is much like biting into a Milky way ironically enough. We hope to be serving this coffee up for the long haul. 

Importer Notes:

“El Salvador's most productive region, Santa Ana, borders Honduras and Guatemala along the western side of the country. Historically, El Salvador's largest estates and mills were located in Santa Ana, making it the most well-known. Throughout the region, single producers, communities, and estates grow both traditional, new, and Kenyan varieties and then wash or dry coffees naturally. Known as “the land of volcanoes,” El Salvador is the smallest Central American country (roughly the same size as New Jersey), but its reputation among specialty-coffee-growing regions has grown larger-than-life, especially since the early 2000s. While coffee was planted and cultivated here mostly for domestic consumption starting in the mid-1700s, it became a stable and significant crop over the next 100 years, notably increasing in national importance during the late 1800s, when the country’s indigo exports were threatened by the development and widespread marketability of synthetic dyes.As coffee grew in economic importance, different government programs designed to increase production through land, tax, and military exemption incentives created a small but strong network of wealthy landowners who gained control over the coffee market, in addition to the individual smallholders who were growing coffee as part of their subsistence farming and would sell their cherry to the larger estates or mills.By the late 1970s, coffee exports accounted for 50 percent of the GDP, but socioeconomic and political unrest hurled the country into civil war for more than a decade, and in the 1980s various land-redistribution projects and agrarian reform disjointed the coffee industry and caused the market to decline. Lacking the resources to continue farming, producers abandoned their coffee farms, and many were left overgrown and unharvested for years until a peace agreement was reached in the 1990s.It is often said that the Cup of Excellence competition, which came to El Salvador in 2003, was the beginning of the new “wave” of interest in Salvadoran coffee, shining the first light on some of the special varieties the small country grows.”