History & Origins
Aida Batlle is a fifth-generation coffee producer operating her family’s three farms—Fincas Los Alpes, Kilimanjaro, and Mauritania—in El Salvador’s Santa Ana region. She spent the majority of her childhood and early adulthood in the United States, having fled El Salvador for Miami during its protracted Civil War. With constant threat to life and land the Batlle family took refuge in Miami during the Salvadoran civil war which ranged from 1980 to 1992. After settling down in Nashville at the age of 28 she felt she would instead be more helpful to her father, Mauricio, who was now back on his coffee farm in El Salvador struggling to make ends meet amidst a plummeting coffee market.
In 2002 she arrived in Santa Ana to reevaluate her family’s coffee farm and unearth the hidden potential she knew it had due to ideal conditions such as volcanic soil and high altitude.
In 2003 Aida’s coffee had its first shot at the spotlight when she entered coffee from Finca Kilimanjaro in the inaugural Cup of Excellence competition in El Salvador. Judges at the competition noted that the coffee had great flavor, brightness, and balance and they awarded it the 1st Place coffee of the competition, putting her farm on the international map for the first time, but certainly not the last.
In 2003 she entered her Finca Kilimanjaro coffee in El Salvador’s inaugural Cup of Excellence, and it won first place. The prize in the Cup of Excellence is the auction that follows; Batlle’s Finca Kilimanjaro product was purchased at auction by a Norwegian roaster for US$14.06 a pound, which was at the time a record.
Bourbon came to El Salvador more than a century ago, acquired from Guatemala by the then governor of Santa Ana Province, and who just happened to be Aida Batlle’s great-great-grandfather.
Terroir & Growing Conditions
Aida is a fifth-generation coffee farmer who, while she is native to Miami, produces some of the world’s best coffee on the slopes of the Santa Ana volcano in Western El Salvador.
This full natural coffee was sourced from the growing region of Santa Ana in El Salvador and was produced by the Aida Batlle at 1,585 - 1,725 meters.
The volcanic soils of Santa Ana are very fertile, leading to excellent yields as well as quality.
Both ends of the country share volcanic soils, on the Santa Ana and the Tecapa volcano respectively, but the influence of the cooler coastal climate is clearer at Los Pirineos, meaning coffee grows lower down the mountain, but at a similar average temperature.
The combination of SL-28 (the cultivar) and Santa Ana’s microclimate resulted in a complex coffee without precedent.
Additionally, Los Pirineos is planted with great care and order, separating each varietal and plot, while Kilimanjaro follows the forest, with SL-28 and Bourbon trees interspersed, leading to the varietal blend in this month’s lot.
Though Kilimanjaro already employs a strict “no herbicides” policy, among other practices, Aida is excited to iterate by exploring different types of agriculture and soil management.
Batlle focuses on organic methods and hand-harvesting fully-ripened coffee cherry to produce single-origin coffee beans. Batlle, who knew very little about coffee or coffee farming at the time, did know that coffee was a fruit, and she decided to grow it and treat it as an organic ripe-picked fruit, which at the time was highly unusual; most coffee growers were aiming for highest production at lowest cost, which meant industrial growing methods and machine harvesting of unripened coffee cherry.
Processing & Production
She said that her father did some extensive planting of Kenya SL-28 years ago nd that the Kilimanjaro was a blend with 80% of it and the balance of Red Bourbon.
This lot is a blend of varietals grown at Kilimanjaro, which includes very old SL varietal trees and Bourbon, processed using the washed method.
After becoming the first female winner of El Salvador’s 2003 Cup of Excellence, she broke ground again in 2005 as the first farmer to submit three different processes – washed, pulped natural, and natural. These atypical Central American selections quickly became a favourite of barista competitors and the wider coffee world.
Here, as on all of the family farms, the level of control at all stages is impressive. Only the ripest red cherries are picked, fermentation protocols are followed to the letter, and coffee is stored and dry-milled under exacting conditions.
Her team is capable of producing coffees that mimic the kind of fermentation styles typical to Ethiopia and East Africa, as well as the more traditional washed profiles of El Salvador.
The Burundi process, described in more detail below, is a washed coffee so flavors have less fruit penetration and it presents a clear, transparent cup profile.
This particular lot was fermented in an infusion of cascara (dried husk of the coffee fruit).
For me, experimental processing is about enhancing flavours that are already in the coffee,” says Batlle.
She pays her pickers double the going rate because the work is so much more exacting than typical coffee harvesting.
Cup Profile & Tasting Notes
Dark chocolate, aromatic orchid, strawberry guava, almond butter, frankincense in aroma and cup. Juicy, savory-sweet acidity; delicate, satiny mouthfeel. A bonus coconut note surfaces in the resonant, flavor-saturated finish.
The rewards are clear: Batlle’s natural boasts tropical fruit and concord grape notes, with a velvety texture to give balance to such intense flavours.
The washed process reveals classically dark chocolate, nutty, and stone fruit notes. The Burundi process encourages a more pronounced floral character, with a clean finish and amazing aroma. The natural process is incredibly fruity, showing off with notes of pineapple, banana and chocolate.
Judges at the competition noted that the coffee had great flavor, brightness, and balance and they awarded it the 1st Place coffee of the competition, putting her farm on the international map for the first time, but certainly not the last.
This turned out good, I’m sure the flavor will continue to improve as this rests but it’s quite sweet, has a dried cherry/apricot type fruitiness along with a bit of pleasant herbal bittering notes, big creamy body, long nutty finish.
For us, it’s about the persistent sweetness and lingering finish that carries through all three. We find that, despite their differences, the extra “oomph” in each speaks to the high quality of the raw coffee cherries going in.
This coffee delivers a razor-clean profile with a syrupy body and vibrant flavor notes of tamarind and citrus.
The originality of this sweetly intricate, multilayered cup is doubtless owing both to a distinguished tree variety – Kenya’s famous SL28 – as well as to an innovative processing wrinkle involving conducting the fermentation step in an infusion of cascara, or the dried husk of the coffee fruit.