My family and I made our first trip to El Salvador this year — a welcome escape from the Chicagoland tundra. The trip brought together two meaningful experiences: a pop-up event in partnership with Latinas In Coffee and Jacinta Café, where we shared Swelter's coffees with the local community, and a visit to Las Tres Flores — a third-generation, women-led farm running a beautiful farm-to-cup restaurant.
Bringing the World of Coffee to Salvadorans
Sharing Swelter's mission and coffees with Jacinta's staff and patrons was something I'd been genuinely excited about — because offering specialty coffees from around the world to a coffee-producing community is rare, and really special.
3 founders- Giselle Barrera of Latinas in Coffee, Karla Bosa of Jacinta Cafe, Stephanie Welter-Krause of Swelter Coffee Roasters
Here's something many people don't realize: when you live in a coffee-producing country, you rarely get access to specialty coffees from other origins. Locally, coffee is often either commodity-grade from a multinational brand like Nestlé (ironically, imported), or lower-grade coffee produced nearby — because the best beans are exported for higher income. The farmers growing some of the world's finest coffee often never get to taste it.
I brought coffees from Guatemala, Mexico, Costa Rica, and the DRC to give locals a taste of other origins, different Latin American flavor profiles, and unique processing methods — including a black honey process Costa Rican. (I had intended to also bring some of our other African coffees, but left them behind while packing — a painful oversight.) The DRC and an India coffee moved quickly, and it was a joy to watch patrons discover the different flavor notes and body in each cup.
We spent the afternoon at the café sharing our story, enjoying wonderful snacks, and connecting with the community. We're so grateful to Jacinta and Latinas In Coffee for organizing and making it all possible.
Generational Legacy, Full of Inspiration
About an hour's drive from San Salvador, we visited Las Tres Flores — a farm-to-cup café situated on the family's own land, passed down through three generations and led by the matriarch of the family.
We started with a few pour-overs to explore their different processes and varietals: a rose ferment and a geisha varietal from a neighboring farm. Both were exceptional — complex, layered, light-bodied, and a true showcase of what their land and care can produce.
Las Tres Flores has recently shifted toward specialty coffee and experimental processing, and the family has invested in their own roaster so they can complete the full journey from seed to cup in-house. For a small, family-run farm to have access to the training and equipment needed for both processing and roasting is genuinely uncommon — and a testament to how seriously they're taking the craft.
African drying beds at the Las Tres Flores farm
The driving force behind all of it is Maria, the matriarch, who has led her family into learning, growing, and giving back. Her son Rodrigo (whose English is excellent!) gave us a tour of their drying beds and shared the full scope of what his family has built under his mother's vision. What struck me most was Maria's commitment to transparency — she is actively working to share her family's knowledge and practices with the broader Salvadoran coffee community, because coffee farms globally are under constant pressure to sell to developers. Supporting and sustaining these farms isn't just about about preserving a way of life, it's about securing the future of coffee.