Region: Coatepeque, Santa Ana

Elevation: 1400–1600 masl

About: This coffee hails from the famous Pacas family in El Salvador and is a blend from several of their farms around the Santa Ana Volcano. The farms overlook the picture-perfect Lake Coatepeque and are shrouded in mist for most of the day, creating a unique microclimate for growing coffee. The Pacas family organises and funds a number of social projects in their local community, including a coffee certification program to train the next generation of producers and the Power to Transform program that teaches communication skills in local schools, something very important in a community that has been plagued by political violence in the past. The Pacas family’s operation is carbon negative, meaning that their farms sequester more carbon than their operation releases into the atmosphere. This is especially important in El Salvador, which has one of the highest rates of deforestation in the world and has seen its forested areas decrease from 85% to 15% of its territory.