EL SALVADOR El Ciprés – Espresso

El Ciprés is one of the parts of Majahual we can picture without needing a map. On our visits, the cypress trees along the road are an obvious marker, and when Patrick described the lot again on our last call the terrain came back immediately.
 
Majahual is not a flat farm. It rises and falls through slopes, ridges and shallow depressions that are not quite valleys. El Ciprés sits in one of those folds. The slope shields much of the coffee from direct sun for most of the day, with stronger light arriving later in the afternoon after the sun has moved across the ridge. Patrick and the farm's agronomist see this cooler, more shaded microclimate as one of the main reasons the lot behaves differently from nearby Red Bourbon.
 
The lot sits around 1500 to 1575 masl. Unlike Tempisque, where many trees are around fifty years old, El Ciprés has been replanted over roughly the last twenty years. Patrick believes much of that younger material probably came from seed taken from Majahual's older Red Bourbon trees. That makes El Ciprés an interesting continuation of the farm's Bourbon rather than a completely separate planting: younger trees carrying material from an older generation.
 
The coffee is processed as a natural at Majahual. Ripe cherries stay at the farm and dry slowly on raised beds and through the greenhouses, generally over 25 to 28 days. The cooler environment of the lot belongs to the growing side of the story; the slow drying belongs to the processing side. Neither needs to be exaggerated for the coffee to feel distinct.
 
In the cup, El Ciprés shows rum raisin chocolate, honeydew melon and grapefruit. It has deeper fruit than the washed coffees but keeps a clear line of acidity through the finish. For us, the best part of this lot is how specific it is. We can connect the flavor to a place we have walked, a row of trees we remember and a small pocket of Majahual that gets its light differently from the slope above it.