El Salvador

Why this origin matters

El Salvador matters more for what it selected than for what it ships. Its crop in 2025/26, on the governed USDA estimate, was 586,000 bags, all of it arabica, which makes it one of the smaller producers the USDA itemises; the country's own Coffee Council recorded 1.87 million bags for 2010/11, before the leaf-rust epidemic. But the World Coffee Research catalogue credits Salvadoran institutes with Pacas, Pacamara, Tekisic, Catisic and Cuscatleco. It is also a country whose history can hardly be told apart from its coffee: communal land was abolished by law to make way for it, the killings of 1932 followed a collapse in its price, and in 1980 the state took over its export. And the attaché's 2026 report is unusually frank about a sector in difficulty: old trees, unpaid debt, too few workers and farms being abandoned.

Where coffee grows

The Salvadoran Coffee Council divides the country's coffee into six mountain ranges, and in the profile it presented to the International Coffee Organization in 2016 it gave each an area. Apaneca-Ilamatepec held half: 66,550 of 132,890 hectares. El Bálsamo-Quezaltepec had 37,545, Tecapa-Chinameca 15,705, Chichontepec 6,075, Cacahuatique 4,815 and Alotepec-Metapán 2,200. The same slide gives each range an altitude span, starting at 500 metres above sea level in five of them and reaching 2,365 metres in Apaneca-Ilamatepec; these are the limits within which the Council says coffee is grown in a range, not the height of a typical farm, and the slide gives no survey year for any of it. The profile also says that all of the country's coffee is grown under shade. Ten years on, the USDA attaché's report gives a harvested area of about 118,000 hectares in both 2024/25 and 2025/26, expects the same in 2026/27, and names no range or department; it mentions a renovation effort in what it calls the northern coffee belt and quality laboratories in the western and eastern regions. A 1922 trade history names La Paz as the leading department of its day, and the Library of Congress country study of 1988 says most production took place in the west of the country.

Most growers are small, most of the land is not theirs

The Council's 2016 profile sets it out in a table. Of 21,538 registered producers, 16,987 had 3.5 hectares or less: 79 per cent of the growers, with 18,399 of 132,890 hectares, or 14 per cent of the land. At the other end, 388 producers with more than 70 hectares each, most of them companies or other legal persons, held 52,839 hectares, or 40 per cent. A little over a third of the registered producers were women.

The attaché's 2026 report describes the same shape. It says the smallest producers are most of the country's growers but hold a comparatively small share of the harvested area, and shows it in a chart credited to the Salvadoran Coffee Institute whose bars carry no numbers. Its text puts small farms at about 15 per cent of the area and says that medium-sized farms account for about 37 per cent; in its chart, the bar of that height stands over farms of more than 70 hectares, which agrees with the 2016 table and suggests the text's 'medium' is a slip. CoffeeHQ reports both and relies on the table.

A distribution of this kind, across all farmland and not coffee alone, is what the reform of 1980 was aimed at. The country study records that the 1971 census found 92 per cent of all farms sharing 27 per cent of the farmland, and that the phase of the reform aimed at mid-sized estates, coffee estates among them, had still not been carried out in 1987.

The 2026 report also says that 35 per cent of farmers are abandoning their farms, that some have moved to cocoa or maize, and that others have sold land to property developers to clear debts. It gives no source for the 35 per cent.

Species and varieties

All of El Salvador's production is arabica in the attaché's table. What is planted is best documented by the country's own authority, and none of its statements is recent. The Council's 2016 profile gives Bourbon 62 per cent, Pacas 31, Pacamara 2 and others 5, without saying whether that is a share of area or of crop; its table of mountain ranges shows Bourbon as the largest share in five of the six and Pacas in the sixth, Alotepec-Metapán. The Council's website, as captured in 2019, called Tekisic, a selection of Bourbon, the main variety with about half the total area, and put Pacas at 27 per cent. The World Coffee Research catalogue says, without a date, that Pacas accounts for about a quarter of the country's production and Tekisic and unselected Bourbon together for nearly 70 per cent. All three describe a country planted overwhelmingly with Bourbon and its dwarf mutation, both of which the catalogue rates as susceptible to leaf rust. The attaché's 2026 report names varieties in three places, as different lists: the government's seedling programme distributes mainly Cuscatleco, Marsellesa, Pacas, Pacamara, Sarchimor and Anacafe 14; retail demand at home is rising, it says, for Bourbon, Pacas, Pacamara and Geisha; and Geisha and Pacamara, in its words, maintained their dominance in the country's 2025 Cup of Excellence. It gives no share of the area for any variety, so how far the planting has changed since 2016 is not something CoffeeHQ can state.

The varieties El Salvador gave the region

Pacas is a natural mutation of Bourbon that makes the plant grow small. The World Coffee Research catalogue records that it was found in 1949 on a farm owned by the Pacas family in the Santa Ana region, and that the Salvadoran research institute began selecting from it in 1960; the Coffee Council's website names the farm as San Rafael, on the Santa Ana volcano, and says the institute compared it with Brazil's Caturra and Costa Rica's Villa Sarchi and concluded that the three were genetically similar. The catalogue adds that Honduras's coffee institute introduced it there in 1974.

Pacamara is the cross the institute then made between Pacas and Maragogipe, a large-beaned mutation of Typica. The Council dates the crossing to 1958 and the variety's release to the early 1980s, as a blend of selected lines in their fifth generation. The catalogue rates its quality potential at altitude as exceptional and says the selection was never completed: the variety is not homogeneous and plants are not stable from one generation to the next, which is why a field of it is uneven.

Tekisic is the institute's selection of Bourbon itself, begun in 1949 and released in 1977 on the catalogue's account, or 1976 on the Council's; both explain the name as an indigenous word for work joined to the institute's initials. Catisic is its selection from a cross of a Timor Hybrid line with Caturra, made from Catimor lines that the Council says were brought to the country in 1978; the Council names resistance to leaf rust as its chief attribute. Cuscatleco, from the research foundation, is a selection from the line behind the Sarchimor group.

The catalogue rates Pacas and Pacamara as susceptible to leaf rust. That matters for what follows: the names the country is known for are among the plants a rust outbreak hits hardest, and the seedlings the government now hands out include rust-resistant lines from elsewhere beside them.

Old trees, and a debt trust from 2001

The attaché's central point is that the trees are old and nobody can afford to replace them. Many are over 25 years old, the report says, and past their productive life. National yield in 2025/26 was 4.97 bags a hectare, which it calls low and attributes to the lack of a renovation programme reaching most of the harvested area. It quotes the Salvadoran Coffee Association's estimate that about 30 million rust-resistant plants a year would be needed for ten years to renovate the country's coffee, and says more than seven million plants a year are needed merely to replace those that die.

The complaint is an old one. The country study of 1988 said growers normally replaced at least five per cent of their plants a year and that many had stopped doing so during the war; the 2015 review found half the area more than twenty years old; and the Council's 2016 profile gave yields of 5 to 12 bags a hectare in what it called current conditions against 10 to 25 in normal ones.

Money is the obstacle the attaché returns to. Growers are still repaying debts under a coffee trust set up in 2001 to defer what they owed; capital repayments were suspended in 2014 for three years so that the money could go into replanting and fighting rust, and the suspension has been extended to the end of 2026. Private banks, the report says, will not lend to coffee farms. Government help is aimed at farms of under 3.5 hectares, which it says hold less than 15 per cent of the planted area, and seedlings handed out without finance often go unplanted or die.

It lists two government plans, one proposed in 2019 and a rescue programme announced in April 2021 that was to restructure about 240 million dollars of debt and renovate 35,000 hectares, and says of both that a lack of funds has delayed them. A third measure, a loan of 45 million dollars from the Inter-American Development Bank secured in January 2021, it describes as spent on technical assistance and preferential loans for smallholders and on setting up a coffee research institute. These are the attaché's assessments, and the report is clear that it thinks the measures insufficient.

Harvest

The Council's 2016 profile gives the harvest as October to March. Its month-by-month table of production for the six coffee years from 2010/11 shows where the weight falls: November, December and January together carry between 71 and 82 per cent of each year's total, October and March are small, and a last row for April and May together holds a few per cent in five of the years and 13 per cent in 2010/11. The table does not say whether a month's figure is coffee picked or coffee received and recorded in that month, so it shows the shape of the season, not the picking dates. The USDA's marketing year for the country runs from October to September, and the attaché's 2026 report says that in the 2025/26 season the fruit was at peak ripeness in December, when heavy rain knocked much of it off the trees. No source read gives the harvest by mountain range or by altitude.

The rust years, month by month

The Coffee Council's own table records 1,239,585 bags for the coffee year 2012/13 and 506,310 for 2013/14: a fall of 59 per cent in one season. It shows in the first weeks. October 2013 brought 9,475 bags, against 140,735 the October before, and November 54,685 against 407,115. The two years after were 669,115 bags and 543,200; another slide of the same deck calls its 2015/16 figures preliminary, for the harvest to 30 April 2016.

A peer-reviewed review of the epidemic, published in 2015, sets this in its regional pattern. Unusually high rust was reported in El Salvador in 2011-12, a year before the main epidemic, in the Bálsamo range. In 2012-13, when production across Central America fell by 16 per cent, El Salvador's harvest rose slightly; the fall came the following season, which the review puts at 54 per cent and attributes mainly to rust, citing the regional coffee programme. A food-security bulletin of March 2014 quotes the Council's estimate at that moment, 723,000 quintals of green coffee, as 58 per cent below the previous harvest and 72 per cent below 2010/11, and says 93,053 jobs had been lost since the season before. The three percentages, 54, 58 and 59, are the same collapse counted at different moments by different bodies.

The review offers reasons the country was exposed. Half of El Salvador's coffee area, 51 per cent, was more than twenty years old, on figures it credits to the national coffee institute; four fifths of Central America's coffee was planted with susceptible varieties although resistant ones had existed since the 1990s; and an earlier severe epidemic had struck El Salvador in 2002-03, which the review, like the others it lists, sets beside a fall in coffee prices. Its authors call their causes plausible, not proven, and note that losses to the disease are hard to separate from the ordinary swing between years. The Council's own slide shows the three post-2012/13 shortfalls under the heading of crop losses due to adverse weather, and does not mention rust on it.

The crop has not returned. On the governed USDA series it has stayed between 550,000 and 604,000 bags in each of the five seasons from 2021/22 to 2025/26. Those are a different body's estimates and are not a continuation of the Council's table, but they are of the same order as the years just after the collapse and less than half of 2012/13.

A harvest without enough hands

Labour is, in the attaché's words, a critical challenge. The report attributes the shortage to people moving from the countryside to the cities, drawn by construction work, and says it leaves farms without workers for pruning, weeding, applying inputs and picking. The Salvadoran Coffee Institute's figures, as the report charts them, show the jobs the sector generates falling from 46,102 in 2021/22 to 42,099 in 2025/26, with one small rise on the way. The report does not say how a job is counted.

The Council's 2016 profile did say, and its method shows why such figures move with the crop: it allowed 16.5 days of work for every bag produced, farm and mill together, and called 250 days one job. On that arithmetic it gave 86,500 jobs for 2012/13 and 35,001 for 2013/14, the year of the collapse. A job in these series is a quantity of work calculated from the harvest, not a person counted, and the two series should not be read as one.

How the coffee is processed

On the Council's 2016 profile, 96 per cent of the coffee is washed, in a process it says takes place at processing plants from cherry to green coffee, and the remaining 4 per cent is semi-washed, honey or natural. The profile counts 76 processors against more than 21,000 registered producers, which is consistent with a system in which most growers deliver fruit to a mill and do not process it themselves; the attaché's 2026 report, for its part, names the mills' charge for preparing coffee for export as a cost that falls on the farmer. A century earlier the position was the reverse, on the one account CoffeeHQ has read: a 1922 trade history said planters in Salvador favoured the dry method and that the bulk of the crop was natural, or unwashed. Nothing read says when or why that changed, and the 2016 shares have no year attached.

How it is graded and sold

The Council's profile names three altitude classes used in the trade: Central Standard for coffee grown between 600 and 800 metres, High Grown between 800 and 1,200, and Strictly High Grown above 1,200. They are a classification by where the coffee was grown and say nothing by themselves about how a given lot tastes. Its export table groups coffee as commercial, sold under those three classes; differentiated, which covers gourmet, organic, certified and what it calls fine coffee; and sub-standard. As the crop shrank, the balance changed: differentiated coffee was 460,000 of 1.74 million bags exported in 2010/11 and 424,000 of 598,000 in 2014/15. For its own gourmet certificate the Council's website sets minimum standards: at least 98 per cent of the beans held on a size 16 screen, moisture between 11 and 12.5 per cent, no primary defects and at most two secondary ones counted by the Specialty Coffee Association of America's method, and a clean cup. On the attaché's estimate for 2025/26 almost all of the crop is exported as green beans, 500,000 of 535,000 bags, with the United States taking about half and Belgium second. The report's trade section says farmers sold accumulated stocks that season to take advantage of high prices, though its stocks section speaks of farmers holding coffee back, and its table has stocks falling only slightly, from 158,000 bags to 147,000. It describes the best lots as sold through electronic auctions after the Cup of Excellence at prices it puts at 100 to 300 US dollars a hundredweight above the futures price. That is a premium for competition lots, not what a farm is ordinarily paid: the 2016 profile put the average price paid to growers between 2010 and 2015 at 66 to 75 per cent of the export price.

A coffee country that imports its coffee

El Salvador imports about 270,000 bags of coffee a year in green-bean equivalent, on the attaché's estimate for 2025/26: nearly half as much as it grows. Almost all of it is soluble. Mexico became the largest supplier that season, ahead of Brazil, with Colombia, Nicaragua and the United States behind them.

The report presents this as a pressure on growers, not a curiosity: it says imported soluble coffee competes directly with local coffee, and names the mills' charge for preparing coffee for export, about 100 dollars a hundredweight, as another cost that erodes what a farmer keeps. Mexico appears on the other side of the same trade in its own entry, which describes green coffee coming in and instant coffee going out.

Six names, registered over eleven years

Each of the six mountain ranges is also the name of a denomination of origin. The Council's website explains what that is in Salvadoran law: a sign granted by the state under the trademark law as reformed in 2013, registered with the national registry, and administered by a body on which representatives of the executive for the economy, for agriculture and for the national registry sit beside producers elected from the denomination's members. In a notice of June 2022 the Council said that in 2011 only Apaneca-Ilamatepec was registered, and that on 23 June 2022 the other five, Cacahuatique, Tecapa-Chinameca, Chichontepec, Alotepec-Metapán and Bálsamo-Quezaltepec, were registered by the European Union. The attaché's 2026 report mentions geographical indications established with six coffee regions and does not name them.

What CoffeeHQ has not read is any denomination's rules: which municipalities each covers, what altitude or variety it requires, or how much coffee is sold under it. Until one is read, the names here are registered names and mountain ranges, and nothing is said about what a coffee carrying one must be.

How coffee is drunk in El Salvador

El Salvador drinks more than half as much coffee as it grows, and most of it is not its own. On the USDA attaché's estimate for 2025/26 the country consumed 332,000 bags in green-bean equivalent, of which 292,000 were soluble coffee and 40,000 roasted and ground. The soluble coffee is largely imported, from Mexico, Brazil, Colombia and Nicaragua, and the attaché puts its appeal down to price and convenience. The pattern is not new: the profile the Salvadoran Coffee Council presented in 2016 put consumption at 2.7 kilograms a head a year, said 60 per cent of it was soluble, and said that only 40 per cent of the coffee drunk in the country was grown there. The 2026 report also describes a growing coffee-shop trade in shopping centres and rising retail demand for named local varieties, and attributes a rise in consumption partly to tourism.

The 2025/26 figures are the USDA attaché's estimates in green-bean equivalent for the marketing year beginning October 2025, made in April 2026. The 2016 figures are the Council's, from a slide that gives no year or method for them.

History

The sources give three dates for coffee's arrival, and CoffeeHQ cannot choose between them. The Coffee Council's own history says historians place it between 1779 and 1796, with the first plants on the land of two farmers in Ahuachapán who had the seed from Jutiapa in Guatemala; the profile the same Council presented in 2016 says 1740; and a 1922 trade history says coffee had been cultivated since about 1852, when plants were brought from Havana. What followed is better attested. The Council records a decree of 1846 exempting growers on land above 5,000 feet from municipal office and coffee workers from military service for ten years, and the crop from tax for seven; and says that from 1857 cultivation spread from Ahuachapán to Santa Ana and Sonsonate, and later to San Vicente, the hills of Berlín and the volcano of San Miguel. The trade history says exports were worth more than 100,000 dollars in 1865 and reached 8.5 million pounds by 1874-75, and places the first large plantations in La Paz in 1876, which sits oddly with the Council's westward account and is recorded here as its statement. By 1880, on the Library of Congress country study, coffee had become virtually the only export crop, and the value of coffee exports rose by more than 1,100 per cent between 1880 and 1914. The Council's history says that in the 1950s growers replaced the older arabica with Bourbon and raised planting densities, and that by the middle of the 1970s El Salvador was the world's fifth-largest producer, with harvests near five million quintals. The two sections that follow cover what that expansion cost and how the state later took hold of the trade. CoffeeHQ has read no history of the years after 1988 apart from the leaf-rust epidemic.

Communal land abolished, and the killings of 1932

The spread of coffee in El Salvador went together with the end of land held in common. The Library of Congress country study describes governments of the late nineteenth century as agreed on promoting coffee, on eliminating communal landholdings to make room for it, and on anti-vagrancy laws to ensure that the people displaced supplied labour to the plantations. A decree of 1 March 1879 let private individuals take title to common land, the ejidos, if they planted at least a quarter of it with named crops, coffee and cocoa chief among them; the communal lands known as tierras comunales were abolished in February 1881 and the ejidos in March 1882, leaving private property the only form of tenure the law recognised. In 1912 a National Guard was created whose units, on the study's account, were posted on the coffee estates and whose commanders were routinely paid by the owners.

The same study says that between 1928 and 1931 the export price of coffee fell by 54 per cent and that rural wages were cut by as much or more. In January 1932 insurgents captured government buildings in the towns of Izalco, Sonzacate, Nahuizalco, Juayúa and Tacuba; within three days, on the study's account, the government was back in control. The reprisals that followed are known as la matanza, the massacre. The study gives estimates of the rural people killed that run as high as 30,000, cites the historian Alastair White's figure of 15,000 to 20,000 as the best approximation, and sets them against no more than thirty civilians killed by the insurgents; it describes those executed as campesinos, mainly Indians. A decade earlier the 1922 trade history had described the labourers on Salvadoran coffee farms as almost entirely indigenous.

On the land there is a second account. Héctor Lindo-Fuentes's economic history of nineteenth-century El Salvador, published in 1990, describes the same course: legislation of 1879 that promised title to those who planted at least a quarter of their ejido land with export crops, then laws of 1881 and 1882 abolishing communal lands and ejidos, because, in his words, the export sector needed room to expand. He adds two things the study leaves out. The communities were not themselves an obstacle to coffee, and after 1879 made substantial efforts to grow it; and how much land was involved is disputed, with the 1879 survey putting ejidos at about 13 per cent of the national territory and later writers' estimates for ejidos and communal lands together running from a quarter to two fifths, the highest of which he calls exaggerated. So the sources support saying that the law ended common tenure as coffee expanded, and do not support saying that most coffee land had been common land.

That account rests on one synthesis, written for the United States government in 1988, and historians who have worked on the question do not agree with its number or with each other. A doctoral history of American diplomacy in Central America, defended at Leiden University in 2012, sets the literature side by side. Thomas Anderson, in what it calls the classic account, noted that the regime destroyed the official documents and, from local sources, judged 8,000 to 10,000 victims reasonably accurate. Gould and Lauria-Santiago, using numbers from the British legation and other observers at the time, call 10,000 deaths a reasonable estimate. Lindo-Fuentes gives a range of 10,000 to 30,000 and says there are no records to establish the number. Others give 30,000, or a minimum of 10,000 and a maximum of 40,000 with 30,000 the figure most often cited.

CoffeeHQ has read that thesis and not the books it summarises. No count was kept, the estimates differ by a factor of four or five, and this entry does not choose between them. The killings are described here because an entry on Salvadoran coffee that left them out would misdescribe the industry, not because any one source settles how many died.

1980: the state takes the export trade, and part of the land

In 1980, on the country study's account, the government nationalised the marketing and export of coffee, and a governing junta decreed an agrarian reform. The study's chapter on the coup of 1979 places the decree nationalising the export trade with the first junta that followed it, so the measure may belong to the last weeks of 1979; the study does not give its date. A state company, Incafe, became the intermediary between growers and foreign buyers. The reform's first phase expropriated holdings above 500 hectares and turned them into cooperatives; it took in 14 per cent of the country's coffee land. A second phase, aimed at estates of 100 to 500 hectares, where the study says many coffee estates then fell because owners had divided their land among relatives, had still not been carried out in 1987, and the constitution of 1983 had by then raised the ceiling on holdings to 245 hectares.

The study's figures for the years that followed are of decline: about 180,000 hectares in production throughout, but green coffee output down from 175,000 tonnes in 1979 to 141,000 in 1986, which it attributes to lower yields and lower investment. It reports the growers' association's complaint that Incafe's taxes and charges took about half the sale price and that it paid late, and it describes guerrilla attacks, extortion and so-called war taxes on estates, with growers leaving old trees unreplaced in order to limit their losses. In the 1984-85 harvest, it says, guerrillas in the east demanded that pickers be paid four dollars for a hundred pounds, a dollar above the going rate.

Two cautions belong with this. The study was written during the war, for one of the governments involved in it, and its judgement that state control deterred investment is the growers' case as much as a finding. And it stops in 1988: how the war ended and what became of Incafe are not in anything CoffeeHQ has read. The only later evidence it holds is a count: the Council's 2016 profile lists 123 exporters.

Pressures on the sector

• Rain at the wrong moment. The attaché reports that torrential rain in December 2025 knocked fruit off the trees at peak ripeness and dried what remained, cutting both yield and quality at the mill.
• El Niño. The attaché's forecast of a smaller crop in 2026/27 rests on expected unfavourable weather at flowering and harvest as El Niño sets in.
• Droughts and floods more generally. The report calls El Salvador one of the region's most climate-vulnerable countries and says the extremes favour leaf rust, anthracnose and the coffee berry borer.
• Leaf rust itself. A peer-reviewed review of the 2012-13 epidemic lists a shorter gap between day and night temperatures and an early rainy season among its plausible causes across Central America, and is careful to call them plausible, not proven.
• A crop that fell by more than half in 2013/14 and has stayed near that level since.
• Ageing trees and no finance to replace them at the scale the report says is needed.
• Debt carried since 2001, with repayments deferred to the end of 2026.
• Labour. Migration to the cities has left farms short of workers for cultivation and harvest.
• Weather. Heavy rain at peak ripeness in December 2025; an El Niño forecast for 2026/27.
• Imported soluble coffee, which the attaché says competes directly with the local crop.

The first three are the attaché's statements about two seasons and its own characterisation of the country's exposure. The fourth is a regional finding, not one measured in El Salvador. No Salvadoran climate or plant-health document was read.

Institutions worth knowing

• Consejo Salvadoreño del Café (the Salvadoran Coffee Council) — the state coffee authority. Its 2016 profile gives it a board of four public members (the agriculture, environment and tourism ministries and the central bank) and four from the private sector; its website describes departments that register producers, authorise exports, certify quality and publish statistics. By 2023 its website carried the name Instituto Salvadoreño del Café, and the USDA's 2026 report calls it the Salvadoran Coffee Institute
• Instituto Salvadoreño de Investigaciones del Café (ISIC) — the research institute the World Coffee Research catalogue names as the breeder of Pacas, Pacamara, Tekisic and Catisic
• Fundación Salvadoreña para Investigaciones del Café (PROCAFÉ) — the foundation the catalogue names as the breeder of Cuscatleco, and the body a 2015 review credits with reporting the first unusual rust in 2011-12
• CENTA-Café — described in the Council's 2016 profile as part of the national agricultural technology centre, a state body from 2014, carrying out research, technical visits and training
• Incafe — the state company that held the marketing and export of coffee after the trade was nationalised in 1980, on the account of the Library of Congress country study of 1988. CoffeeHQ has read nothing on what became of it

Explore El Salvador's coffee from here

A reading order, not a list of everything related: each step picks up something this page raised and takes it further.

1. Step 1PacasThe dwarf Bourbon mutation found in Santa Ana in 1949, with the catalogue's ratings.
2. Step 2PacamaraThe cross made from it: one of two varieties the report says dominated the 2025 competition, and a plant that does not breed true.
3. Step 3BourbonThe variety most of El Salvador's coffee still was, on its own authority's figures, when the rust arrived.
4. Step 4SarchimorThe rust-resistant group behind Cuscatleco and Marsellesa, two of the seedlings the government now distributes.
5. Step 5Coffee pests and diseasesWhat leaf rust is, and why old, susceptible plantings are the ones an outbreak finds.
6. Step 6MexicoThe largest supplier of the instant coffee El Salvador drinks, seen from the exporting side.
7. Step 7GuatemalaThe neighbour to the west, hit by the same epidemic, and what its attaché reports about replanting after it.
8. Step 8Tasting LabTaste a Pacas beside a Pacamara, or beside a Bourbon, and record what differs, without a national flavour note to steer you.