Stumptown is proud to introduce Los Caleros, a Direct Trade coffee from a group of producers from San Miguel Ingenio Mill. Los Caleros comes from the toponymic name for Metapán. Cal means lime powder or limestone, one of the most significant natural resources in the area. This region has a long history of mining steel, copper, gold, silver, zinc, and the all-important limestone which was used for making cement. Metapán is located in the geographically oldest area of El Salvador, where two mountain chains meet, producing the highest peaks in the country. The mountainous landscape is filled with native pine, oak, liquidambar, and inga trees with loamy, limestone, and clay soil making it ideally suited for coffee cultivation.
This coffee’s story begins in the late 1800’s with the Valiente family. Samuel Luna one of the first miners in San José Ingenio, opened a coffee mill in the nearby San Miguel Ingenio. His son in law, Juan Ramón Calderón took over the mill and started cultivating his own coffee. In 1932 an epic flood destroyed the mill. Calderón rebuilt it and it remains a working coffee mill to this day. In the early 1960’s, Calderón started Finca Buenos Aires in the Montenegro Cantón. Since the 1980´s, Calderón’s grandchildren have taken over the coffee operation and Alejandro Valiente runs the mill operations. Today, the San Miguel Ingenio mill processes the Valiente family’s coffee and over 50 smallholder producers with farms in the area. The mill puts the upmost care and detail into its processing practices in order to highlight the intrinsic quality of the red ripe coffee cherry. Alejandro Valiente is developing a progressive integral farming model, so that smallholder producers with half to two hectare farms can learn the connection between their cultivation practices, the processing, the final cup quality and the roasting partner’s needs.
This lot was selected by Stumptown based on individual cuppings of many batches from different farms around the San Miguel Ingenio mill. 52% of this lot comes from the Valiente family’s farms: Buenos Aires, and El Porvenir. With 30 permanent and 175 seasonal employees, these farms are committed to plant health by using traditional pruning and weeding methods. Many of the same genetic strains of Bourbon and Typica varietals have been kept since the 1960’s. The other 48% comes from eight smallholder producers: Tadeo Martinez, Manuel Martinez, Filadelfo Martinez, Adan Martinez, Juan Antonio Martinez, Adelso Martinez, José Alberto Díaz, and Jose Manuel Martinez. They all work closely with Alejandro Valiente with a focus on high quality results and improvement year after year. These producers have created a strong community, working together in the field and with harvesting, to producer better quality coffee in order to improve their own lives.