How Does El Salvador Pacas Coffee Taste? Characteristics of El Salvador Pacas Coffee

FrontStreet Coffee: An Introduction to the El Salvador Pacas Variety

Arabica Coffee Variety: Pacas

Pacas belongs to the Bourbon family - a natural genetic mutation of Bourbon, first discovered and selected in El Salvador around 1949. Its most visible difference from Bourbon is the plant's shorter stature, clustered fruiting, and high yield. In the cup, however, it clearly outperforms its fellow "Dwarf Bourbon" nickname-holder, Caturra. That's why Pacas is so often used in breeding, most famously in Pacamara, the hybrid of Pacas and Maragogype.

El Salvador's active volcanoes blanket the country in mineral-rich volcanic ash. Soil built primarily on volcanic ash holds plenty of minerals but little organic matter, so to maintain fertility and compensate for that shortage, Salvadoran farmers use processed coffee pulp residue and organic matter gathered under the coffee trees as fertilizer, enabling the trees to produce beans with more harmonious flavors.

El Salvador's most meaningful contribution is having pioneered organic agriculture for the world, producing more than 150,000 tons of organic coffee a year. The country has five major producing regions (Apaneca, Central Belt, Chichontepec, Tecapa, and the Cacahuatique Mountain Range), mostly on high-altitude mountain slopes or plateau land above 1200 meters covered with volcanic ash. The harvest runs from November through April of the following year.

Because coffee thrives in mild climates, Salvadoran coffee is mostly grown under tall shade trees - shade-grown coffee - to keep excessive heat and direct sunlight from compromising bean quality.

The beans produced are arabica, planted mainly with Pacas and Bourbon varieties: large beans with sweet flavor and an excellent cup.

In Brief

FrontStreet Coffee is a coffee research house dedicated to sharing coffee knowledge with everyone. We share without reservation to help more friends fall in love with coffee, and we hold three discounted coffee events every month because FrontStreet Coffee wants more friends to enjoy the best coffee at the lowest prices - this has been our principle for the past six years!

FrontStreet Coffee Recommendation

Coffee splits into three founding species - arabica, robusta, and liberica - and nearly every specialty coffee on the market is arabica, prized for its complex, pure flavors that shift with each region. Among arabica varieties, Bourbon stands out: an old variety like Typica, named for the island of Bourbon where it was first planted, with broad dense foliage, round-short beans, and yields about 30% higher than Typica. Red-fruited Bourbon is the norm, but natural mutations include Yellow Bourbon, whose cherries ripen orange-yellow. FrontStreet Brazil Fazenda Rainha is one of the earliest discovered Yellow Bourbons, showing cream, peanut, toasted bread, and sugarcane aromas - rich, mellow, and sweet - and it suits pour-over, moka pot, and espresso alike.

If you'd like to explore other celebrated arabicas, FrontStreet Panama Red Label Geisha delivers fragrant florals, citrus, peach, and complex fruit acidity with a silky cream body and an oolong-tea sweetness on the finish - grown at the famous Esmeralda Estate in Boquete, Chiriqui, on fertile volcanic soil under old-growth forest and year-round mist. FrontStreet Jamaica Blue Mountain No.1 is built on Typica, transplanted from Martinique to Jamaica's Blue Mountains in the 1820s, where over 200 years it evolved better disease resistance and a balanced, gentle sweetness found nowhere else. And FrontStreet Colombia Sidra - a variety whose genes resemble Ethiopian landraces and which shot to fame when 2022 World Barista Champion Anthony Douglas used Finca La Linea's Sidra - offers medium-light roasted florals, tropical fruit, grape, dried fruit, and passion fruit with a juice-like body.