Nicaragua - Las Tres Hermanas Tekisic FW

Brew Guide:

Best Brewed with: Filter/Espresso

Lightest Roaster Influence: We found this coffee needed a touch more time in the roaster - that the sort of flavours we can add via roasting - more caramels and developed sugar flavours - were the right move with the profiling. A longer overall roast and a bit more soluble  

Best Rested: 3 weeks 

Filter: 60g/L, 94°C when fresh but when well rested you can go down to 92-93°C

Espresso: 18g/42g/30-34s - we think this is a great trad espresso

We’re tasting: Comforting aromas of walnut whips, brown sugar, baked apple. In the cup it's pecan pie alongside baked pear & apples, with a syrupy body. As it cools, more acidity comes to the fore - reminding us of Rwanda-esq flavours of black tea with lemon, soft stonefruit (dried apricot especially), and baking spice. A comforting, well integrated easy drinker.

Traceability

The Story

This is our second year buying through The Good Sourcing, a French importer whose Central American network offers a more interesting range than perhaps we might find through the more established UK-based importers, such that we're happy to take on the faff of moving coffee from Europe to the UK once it lands. Last year's La Cascada from Max Padilla ran as our house filter; this year we've gone deeper into their Nicaraguan offerings with two lots from Cynthia Morales.

Cynthia inherited Las Tres Hermanas (named for her and her two sisters) from her father. The farm sits high in the Dipilto mountains near the Honduran border, with the highest parcels reaching 1,600 metres growing under native shade trees. Alongside running the farm, she teaches coffee cultivation through a government-funded national programme, as one of several women in leadership positions within the Bridazul network.

Claudia Lovo established Bridazul in 2019 to support small and medium-scale producers in Nueva Segovia with agronomic monitoring, training, and pricing designed to cover production costs. Around fifty farms now work with the project. Claudia and her partner Sasa Sestic had built a reputation in the region through their early work applying carbonic maceration to coffee in the early 2010s, and Bridazul grew partly from neighbouring farmers seeking access to their infrastructure and expertise.

Bridazul also runs a physical "beneficio", a larger communal processing and drying station common across Central American coffee production where wet parchment or cherry is brought for controlled drying after initial farm-level picking & processing. For smallholders without the capital to build drying infrastructure, access to a well-run beneficio is often the difference between commodity and speciality pricing. Bridazul now supports around fifty farms in Nueva Segovia with agronomic monitoring, training, and pricing designed to cover production costs. The second lot we'll release from Cynthia as soon as there's space on the offer uses their carbonic maceration process.

Both lots from Cynthia are Bourbon Tekisic - a selection of the Bourbon variety developed by the Salvadoran Institute for Coffee Research between 1949 and 1977. The method was "mass selection": identifying the highest-performing plants, bulking their seed, and repeating across generations. Thirty years of work to isolate genetic lines with the best cup quality potential, not yield or disease resistance. Tekisic now makes up a significant portion of El Salvador's production and has spread across Central America, but it remains highly susceptible to leaf rust.