Green Beans
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The terroir
Apaneca sits in the Apaneca–Ilamatepec range, El Salvador's youngest and most active volcanic belt. Repeated ash falls have built deep Andisol soils: light, porous, high in organic matter, and unusually good at holding water while still draining freely. At 4,265 feet (1,300 m) the nights are cool enough to slow cherry maturation, and slow maturation is where the sugar concentration comes from.
The varieties
Bourbon is the older parent of most Central American arabica, kept for its sweetness and structure despite modest yields. Pacamara is El Salvador's own: a 1958 cross made by the national research institute, ISIC, between Pacas, a dwarf Bourbon mutation found near Santa Ana in 1949, and the giant-beaned Maragogipe. Together they set Bourbon's rounded sweetness underneath Pacamara's larger, more aromatic bean.
In the cup
Honey processing dries the seed with its sticky mucilage still attached: no long water fermentation, no full natural. More fruit sugar stays in the bean and the body thickens, without the heavy ferment character a natural can carry. A medium roast caramelizes those sugars just far enough to read as hazelnut and golden caramel, finishing smooth and rounded.
Regenerative farming
On the slope
The native shade canopy stays standing. Cover crops hold the ground between rows, coffee pulp is composted and returned to the plot, tillage is kept to a minimum, and bare soil is never left exposed through the rains.
In the soil
Organic matter rises, and with it the soil's capacity to hold water and exchange nutrients. Living roots and fungal networks stay intact, which matters on volcanic Andisols, where much of the phosphorus is bound up in the clay and needs soil biology to release it.
In the tree
Deeper, better-colonized root systems reach moisture through the dry months. Shade lowers leaf temperature and buffers heat stress, so the tree is not pushed into the boom-and-bust cycles that exhaust it. Healthier trees stay productive for far longer.
In the cup
Shade slows ripening by weeks. A cherry that matures slowly lays down more sugar and more aromatic precursors before it is picked, and it ripens more evenly along the branch, which is what makes selective hand-picking worth the labor.
Family micro-lots
Aluna, Dawn and Sunset are micro-lots, grown and kept separate by our own family on our own land. Volume programs are a separate tier — see Partners.
What a micro-lot is
A micro-lot is a batch harvested, processed, dried and roasted entirely on its own, often from a single plot or a single section of one farm. It never joins a blending tank with anyone else's coffee. That is why it can be traced back to one family and one slope rather than to a country.
Who grows it
We do. Floranza coffee is grown on our family's own land in Apaneca and Chalatenango, on holdings of about a hectare and a half — the scale typical to these ranges. The same family has worked these plots from one generation to the next, since coffee reached the region in the 1880s.
Why it costs more
Our slopes are too steep to mechanize, so we pick every cherry by hand, returning to the same trees repeatedly because a branch ripens unevenly over several weeks. Keeping each lot separate also costs us the volume premium we would earn by pooling the harvest.
What it buys you
Traceability that holds up to questions, and a cup that shifts a little from year to year because it is one slope's harvest rather than a regional average. Because we farm it ourselves, nothing passes through a collection point or a broker between the plot and the roaster: the people who pick the cherry are the people whose name is on the bag.
How we process the coffee at our farm
Growing, milling, drying, roasting and packing all happen on the mountain. Only the finished coffee travels.
Picking
We pick by hand and take only ripe cherry, returning to the same trees over several weeks because a branch never ripens all at once. Nothing is stripped.
Pulped the same day
Cherry goes to the mill the day it is picked. The skin comes off and the sticky mucilage stays on the seed: fully for our honey lots, partly for the semi-washed.
Dried slowly
The coffee dries on raised beds, turned by hand through the day so it dries evenly down to a stable moisture level. Rushing this stage is what flattens a cup.
Rested in parchment
The lot rests in its parchment husk, which protects the bean in storage. We hull close to the roast date rather than months ahead.
Selected by hand
Every bean passes the sorting table. Broken beans, insect damage, black and sour beans and quakers — the immature seeds that never caramelize — are pulled out one by one, then the lot is graded for size.
Roasted and packed
Only the selected beans reach the roaster, in small batches, on a profile built for that lot rather than a house curve. Packed immediately after roasting, at origin.
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