The Finca Malacara A: The Coffee, The Country, The Community

The Finca Malacara A: The Coffee, The Country, The Community

The Finca Malacara Farm in Santa Ana, El Salvador is home to Monmouth's delicious Finca Malacara A, a medium bodied coffee bean with yellow cherry and honey notes. Malacara translates to 'bad face' but there's nothing bad about this coffee, which is full of spicy fruit and sweetness that we can't resist!

Why you'll love drinking it:

This particular bean is honey processed, and has a luxurious buttery texture with a smooth toffee finish. The coffee has top notes of cedar and spice, and deeper notes of stone fruit as the coffee develops in the cup.

Why it's worth the artisan cost:

The coffee bean is picked by the selective picking method, and the coffee pickers will revisit the coffee plants, picking only the best cherries and then going back over to get the other cherries when they are ripe. This isn't the most efficient method: using the stripping' method would mean all the beans were picked even if they are unripe. But it means that they can produce a better yield of crop and they get the best out of their coffee beans, so that we can too. The Finca Malacara coffee plantation is in a zone of the Santa Ana Volcano which has been called 'the golden coffee belt' due to the extraordinary quality produced by the local coffee plantations. So what better place to go to for our mouth-watering coffee than here?

So who produces it?

The Finca Malacara coffee plantation has been owned and managed by the Alvarez family since 1889, and has been split into three separate areas, Malacara A, B, and C. The Alvarez family have always been seen as outstanding employers, providing good support systems and benefits to their workers. Don Rafael Alvarez Lalinde, the founder of Finca Malacara, saw the quality of life for the workers at the Alvarez estate as the most important factor in the Alvarez work ethic.

More than just an Americano:

The Alvarez plantation continues Don Rafael's outstanding example by providing permanent workers with a decent home, food, a health clinic, a school for children and leisure activities such as football. This gesture of good will and keeping the staff in good living conditions is extended to seasonal workers during the busy harvest period, and the benefits are also extended to visiting coffee pickers and their families as well as receiving a salary much higher than is required by law. The Alvarez family provide such a fantastic support system and benefit package for their workers, making them an important part of the local community.

And it's not just the workers that get looked after! The coffee plantation contributes to the environmental and ecological balance by guaranteeing preservation of the existing flora and fauna in the local area. As well as this, chemical products are used cautiously to prevent any harm to the environment or the workers' health. The well-being of the plantation's workers is at the forefront of the Alvarez work ethic, and this care and consideration for the coffee pickers and their local environment is why they produce such a high quality, high standard coffee bean that tastes delicious! Finca Malacara A is the product of this family's centuries of hard work – why not check it out yourself?