Sicafe Coffee

Flowering us once again here! The smell inside the farm is fantastic! Have you ever been lucky enough to smell fresh coffee flowers? They usually produce a strong jasmine-like smell that completely captivates anyone.

Unusual and inconsistent rains have started to fall at El Angel Estate. These inconsistent rains have brought the fourth (4TH 🤯) flowering to the farm, and it seems we are still waiting for two more flowerings at least.

You might think this is good, but it is completely the opposite. Coffee is a fruit, it starts as a flower, the flower falls, the coffee cherries start forming and with rain start growing and filling. From flowering to ripening it takes 9 months. In previous decades, you had 2 to 3 major flowerings, and probably one small one to accompany them. This means you will have even ripening of coffee cherries in the farm so your pickers would have to go through the farm 2-3 times at most picking the ripest cherries and allowing a little more time for the rest to ripen as well. Climate change has come to affect this greatly. Having had 4 flowerings in very spread out dates (and two more flowerings on the way) means that in order to select the best coffee cherries to guarantee quality, we would have to at least go 4-6 times around the farm picking the coffee.

Again, this may not sound too bad to you. But in El Salvador we are also suffering greatly around the country with labor scarcity. Pickers are paid by weight selected and sorted daily. Those who are still working in coffee farms look for the farms where there is abundance of ripe cherries to pick (where they will earn the most amount of money). So having such uneven flowerings and ripening is not good at all.

We hope the weather stabilizes soon and we are able to have a healthy rainy season for 2025.

The famous “canasto”.

This basket is the tool used by pickers in El Salvador to hold the harvested cherries while they go from tree to tree. They are tied up to their waist allowing both of their hands to be free to use for collecting ripe cherries. There are different sizes of canastos (baskets) but the most commercially used hold 25 lbs or 40 lbs of freshly picked coffee cherries. They are made of a bamboo knitting, making them both lightweight and very sturdy to hold the cherries. Once the basket if full, they start emptying the canastos into bags and continue moving forward along the coffee field.

This picture was taken at Finca El Angel when going through the SL-28 plot. 2nd and 7th place COE 2024 winner coffees. What is there in stock for 2025? 🤓 We cannot wait to try this year’s quality.

The cherries have grown so much in such a short amount of time. We are now halfway through the 2024/2025 harvest. Last harvest started very late, in the Apaneca farms we started picking coffee around the 8th of January, in Siberia around the 16th of January and El Angel only started its first pickings on the 28th of January.

Usually, from flower to ripeness it takes 9 months approximately. Climate change is real, and we’ve been seeing it over the past years on a more dramatic scale. For the flower buds to sprout it requires rain, and the rainy season in El Salvador has been behaving very erratic. Sometimes raining in march/april, sometimes coming late in may/june.

Being a coffee producer means you have to constantly deal with, learn and adapt with nature. Nature you cannot control. We cannot control when it will rain, how much it is going to rain, and when the rains will stop. It is challenging but not impossible.

8,000+ new Sidra coffee trees are on their way now from our nursery at finca La Fany, heading over to finca El Angel 👼🏻 where they will shortly be planted. The Sidra seeds came straight from one of the best farms in Ecuador. Genetics is key to success, therefore we specifically select what we are going to produce in our farms and source our seeds very carefully keeping this in mind.

We are currently working strongly on renovations in all of our farms. Young, healthy plants are the key to our future. At Siberia this year we are working on renovating our Pacamaras, Bourbons, and expanding two small areas of the Batian and Java. At San Cayetano we are focusing our production in the Red Caturra coffee varietal with a small area with Ethiozar. At La Fany we are renovating our Red Bourbon plots, expanding a little of the Yellow Pacamara, and renovating our Orange Bourbon productive area.

The future is looking good here at Sicafe. Keep a close eye to our publications as we will be announcing exciting things to come!