Miguel and Joanna standing together beside an open drum of coffee cherries, smiling at the camera in an open sided shed with a concrete floor, tools and more drums behind them.

From seed to bag, it never left our hands.

El Salvador · Barrel Banana · 1,050 masl · Marsellesa · 3 × 80g

Sample roasted, not yet for sale

See the whole chain
A yellow Mestizo bag of Valle de Oro Barrel Banana.

Valle de Oro Barrel Banana

Barrel ferment in water, 48 h, blended farm bananas added

Super fruity, loads of tropical fruit. Two days in water with blended farm bananas.

Acidity
Body
Sweetness

Roast date pending

Every link in the chain is ours.

Most coffee travels through a chain of strangers: grower, mill, exporter, importer, roaster, and you taste every handoff. Ours has none. Five links, all of them ours, so we can maximise every part of the value chain and fine-tune it end to end.

  1. Grown

    Valle de Oro, San José de la Majada, Sonsonate, at 1,050 metres. Miguel owns it. Don Julio of Lean Coffee Management runs the agronomy and has for years. Marsellesa only, from seed bought at ECOM CRIAD in Nicaragua and a decade of in-house selection, with no herbicides and no pesticides.

    The coffee plantation at golden hour, shade trees and mountains in the distance.

  2. Processed

    Fermented in a barrel of water for 48 hours, with blended farm bananas added. The bananas steer it toward tropical fruit.

    Miguel and Joanna standing together beside an open drum of coffee cherries, smiling at the camera in an open sided shed with a concrete floor, tools and more drums behind them.

  3. Exported

    By MAVCOFFEE, the family company Miguel runs. The producer files the paperwork, loads the container and ships the coffee. Nothing changes hands between the farm and the roaster. The exporter is us.

    Workers load sacks of freshly picked cherry onto a truck on the farm road.

  4. Roasted

    By Joanna. An engineer before she was a roaster, with years at Ikawa behind her. She measures a roast and writes it down so she can do it again on purpose. How the coffee tastes once it is in the drum is hers.

    Miguel and Joanna laughing together in bright window light at the roaster.

  5. Yours

    A yellow bag and a brew you made yourself. Every step before it was ours, so if anything is off, we know exactly which link to check. Ask us anything; the answer is one of us.

Direct trade usually means a roaster who once visited a farm. This is shorter: the producer, the exporter and the roaster share one table. You cannot get more direct than that.

The farm, in its own words.

The ferment starts the same way the others do: cherries in a barrel of water, submerged and cut off from air, their own microbes working the sugars. But for this one we blended bananas from the farm into the water first, and that steers the whole thing somewhere tropical. We roast it for espresso and get loads of fruit.

This one is still in the barrel.

Ask us and we will tell you when it lands.

Tell us when it is ready