Juayúa, El Salvador

Before you ask, it's pronounced "why-ooh-ah". But none of us have managed to grasp nor remember this in the last couple of days we've been here.

Juayúa is one of a few villages that make up the Ruta de las Flores or the Route of Flowers, that extends 34km through the mountains of eastern El Salvador. To be honest though the area didn't particularly offer what was promised - beautiful villages filled with culture, scenery for hiking and mountain biking...and we didn't see an awful lot of flowers either. You can see that maybe it was a lovely area once upon a time, but currently it isn't really one for the memory bank.

Turning up we had no accommodation booked due to shoddy internet in El Tunco making even just loading a a news article painful so we had to make the rounds at the hostels we knew of. The first one turned us away because they were at capacity. The second one almost did too until Mike realised that Cat's name was on the booking sheet as we'd emailed them a day or so prior but had no reply (or thought we hadn't) due to the internet. So it turned out we had a booking after all. Win.

One thing this area is well known for is coffee, given the prime conditions for coffee plantations. The mountains here are covered with them. The owners of the hostel happened to also own an organic speciality coffee farm/business and considering so far we'd only seen the farms and none of the processing afterwards, we thought we'd check it out and find out more.

We piled into the back of a pickup truck headed for the hills. First stop was the the mill, where the coffee berries arrive freshly picked from the plantation. Here they go through a mixture of different
processes, depending on the quality and the ultimate destination of the coffee beans, whether it be for commercial or specialty coffee.

The commercial coffee is immediately washed and rid of the pulp of the berry, leaving just the beans - whereas the specialty coffee skips this process and goes straight to the next step which is drying. By leaving the skin of the berry on and therefore keeping the honey inside too, this means the speciality coffee beans then absorb these flavours in the drying process.

Drying also has options too. For the commercial coffee in El Salvador it's usually dried just laid out on the ground on tiles, picked up again at the end of each day and then relaid out again the next morning - repeated for about a week. Specialty coffee is usually dried using African beds. These are made of a rectangular wooden frame with mesh for the coffee to be laid out on and rotated every hour for about 6-7 hours each day before being taken in for the evening too. Given the attention and employees required to be present for this method, it's much more expensive which is why the commercial coffee is not dried this way. When the coffee has reached about 10% humidity (vaguely known by the workers but also tested by a machine) it's sufficiently dried. Once dried, the coffee is sorted again by density, the heavier the better. Defects (such a bug nibbles) are counted and/or taken out and again this decides the quality of the coffee. After all that, it's ready for roasting.

From the mill we went to the coffee plantation for one of the types of coffee beans produced by Lechuza. It's basically the end of coffee picking season here so not a lot of berries were left on the trees but we got the gist of the set-up, with wind-breaking trees either side and larger trees down the middle off the coffee trees to offer shade from the sun.

Lastly we headed to a nearby house which had a shed to the side which was almost as if it was out of some trendy home or interior design magazine and somewhat out of place in the depths of a country like El Salvador. Inside was a state of the art coffee machine, a roasting machine and some grinders. Oh and lots of coffee. The boys were somewhat losing it at this point but first we had to learn how to roast some coffee. Controlled temperatures, timers and graphs are all involved in ensuring each different type of coffee bean is roasted to perfection. It took about 12 minutes to roast 9 pounds of coffee beans, taking them from white/pale yellow to chocolatey brown and losing a pound of weight in the process.

Finally it was time to sample the coffee. First we tried the freshly roasted coffee using chemex but it was quite strong and bitter. Usually the coffee is rested for three or four days after roasting before being used or sold. Subsequent coffees were made with rested coffee and before we knew it we'd been made about 4 or 5 different coffees each. Espressos, cappuccinos, macchiatos - you name it, he'd make it. It's fair to say the boys were loving it. Cat and I aren't such massive fans of coffee so we were leaving this one to the boys for the most part!

It was an interesting excursion, realising how many different processes go into making the coffee beans reach the point to where they can be used to make a drink. I think it's made us all appreciate why coffee can cost as much as it does at home sometimes too, given the amount of people that have worked on it before it even hits the cafe or the shelves.

All coffeed out, the following day we caught a bus to one of the other towns on the Ruta de las Flores called Ataco. Unfortunately not just made of tacos as the name may suggest, it was another little village town which is essentially a bigger version of Juayúa, with many colourful murals lining the streets. It wasn't an overly memorable place otherwise but it gave us somewhere different to wander around for a couple of hours.

That afternoon we trudged to a waterfall looking for an escape from the heat. After wandering for over the expected 30minutes we were starting to wonder if we'd taken the wrong path when we stumbled across the waterfall we were after. Not wonderfully spectacular but the water was coming straight from the mountains so it offered a very fresh dip!

Our last morning in Juayúa required a revisit to a wicked cafe we'd found on our first day for brekkie, a random stop at a reptile museum which had some seriously large snakes and a quick feast at the weekend markets that were starting up. We're told Juayúa gets rather busy on the weekends due to said markets so we were happy to avoid the crowds. Time for some more chicken bus trips - this time heading for the capital, San Salvador.Read more