A Particular Coffee
Over the past few weeks, we’ve been offering a naturally processed coffee from El Salvador. To be more specific, we’ve been offering a particular variety of coffee, from a particular lot, on a particular farm, from a particular famer, Mr. Johnny Lemus, located in Chalatenango. In case you missed it, everything about this coffee is particular.
The Pacamara varietal that exclusively makes up this coffee was created in El Salvador by crossing the Pacas and Maragogype varieties (Hoffmann 25). At its best, it can be used to produce coffees with a brightness and pleasantness that rivals most other sought-after varieties. At its worst, it produces cups with odd, off-putting savory flavors that have no place in how most of us think of coffee.
Why does the coffee industry care about particularity? Well, like many food related (seemingly pretentious) concepts it can be traced back to the French and the notion of terroir. This impossible to pronounce word signifies the particular place, the environment, in which something is grown, be it wine grapes, coffee cherries, cacao, or wheat. It can also be used to describe the specific taste that is imparted by a particular environment. This is why enthusiasts in all sorts of craft fields obsess over tiny batches that come from specific areas. Place matters. You can taste place. That’s part of what carefully crafted products remind us of. We all know that a place can smell a certain way, look a certain way, feel a certain way, or sound a certain way, but we’re quicker to forget that it tastes a certain way.
In this way, coffee and other goods become strange, physical memories of particular places from particular harvest seasons. So, every brewed cup of the Johnny Lemus is a real, but transient memory of a small plot of land during a beautiful harvest time. We then layer our own memories into these when we create associations to particular flavors through the ways and times in which we enjoy them. I still remember the taste of a certain Colombian coffee that I treated myself to after long days in graduate school. Likewise, the Johnny Lemus reminds me of early summer mornings, preparing for the day and making coffee for my wife before she wakes up. But these experiences and “secondary” memories, you might say, are only possible because of an earlier memory, captured in a physical, particular good, cultivated by particular folks in a particular place and brought to us.