Finca El Salvador – 14 Screen / Natural

Finca El Salvador (El Salvador)

This coffee comes to us from Rodolfo Ruffatti, a producer we have been working with since the beginning of Ten Belles Coffee. His farm, Finca El Salvador, has been in the Ruffatti family for 4 generations.

What makes this particular coffee unique is that it is entirely made up of screen 14 beans. Screen size is a way of sorting beans by their surface area, and in El Salvador, tradition dictates that any beans smaller than screen 15 are not good enough to be sold internationally.

Rodolfo decided to question this approach, and create a blend of exclusively size 14 beans, taking the smaller screen size beans of various plots of his farm and processing them together. Using his expertise in processing methods, he has created this innovative microlot in order to challenge convention and show the true potential of beans that would otherwise have been wasted. We are proud to have been the first roastery in Europe to ever buy this lot, and to continue to buy it year after year.

Rethinking Screen Size

“Usually you get a mix of sizes, for example, 16up, would be from screen 16 to 20 or more. Screen 15up would be from screen 15 and up. So you get beans of different sizes and the roast is an average of all. We noticed that Ethiopia, which doesn’t do such intense dry milling preparations, is the exception where they sell a mixed bag of different sized beans, some very small. We started questioning why it is that traditional buyers requested only larger beans, usually 16up, while we find all these juicy, floral notes in Ethiopia’s smaller beans.

We were told 14 sized beans are too small, that they are underdeveloped beans with green notes so it is best to sell this as a defect. We did not accept this, we challenged this assumed notion and separated the 14 screen, cupped it and it had interesting florals, good sweetness, and the fact that it roasts super well, being so uniform, we decided it was worth it to separate as a microlot. In conclusion, this is a technical, innovative microlot created at the dry mill by separating beans by size, giving value to the small 14 screen beans. Ten Belles is the first roastery to ever have such a lot from us.”

Rodolfo Ruffatti