Who we are
Two of us. That is the whole company.
Miguel grows the coffee in El Salvador. Joanna roasts it in the same country, though she did not grow up in it. Mestizo is the name for what happens where those two things meet.
Miguel
Salvadoran, and the reason there is anything to roast. He owns Valle de Oro and grew up around it — the flat ground in Sonsonate, the replanting, the trees. In 2007 the farm pulled out its Pacas and Pacamaras and replanted all twenty-one cultivated hectares with Marsellesa, a hybrid specialty did not take seriously at the time. The bet was that rust and a changing climate were coming. It was right, years before the industry agreed.
The agronomy itself is not his — that is Don Julio, of Lean Coffee Management, who has run it for years and decides what the trees need and when. Everything that happens before the coffee leaves the country is Miguel's.
Joanna
Polish, an engineer first and a roaster second, which we think is the right order. She spent years at Ikawa before this. She treats a roast the way an engineer treats anything — measure it, write it down, do it again on purpose.
It shows up upstream of the roaster too: on the farm, the coffee gets turned for an even dry three times a day to start — no numbers yet — and as the dry closes in, the coffee mass's own temperature is checked hourly with three humidity readings a day. Dull work, and the only reason a lot can be repeated a year later instead of hoped for. How this coffee actually tastes once it is in the drum is hers.
Valle de Oro, San José de la Majada.
Unusually flat for El Salvador, which quietly makes everything easier — picking, moving cherry, keeping the drying beds true. Volcanic Andisol soil, 1,050 metres, twenty-six hectares with twenty-one under cultivation. No herbicides, no pesticides, and a managed canopy — roughly forty per cent shade to sixty per cent sun. The whole farm is Marsellesa, on purpose, since 2007.