NOMAD – Parainema 250g | El Salvador

About This Coffee

Carlos Pola grows Parainema at Finca Las Brisas, his family's farm in Juayúa, within El Salvador's Apaneca-Ilamatepec mountain range. Pola is fifth-generation on this land, though his own path back to it wasn't direct — he spent 20 years working in textiles before returning to take over the farm in 2012. He now runs Las Brisas alongside two other family properties, applying mycorrhizal fungi to build soil and root health, farming along the land's natural contours to limit erosion, and tracking the farm's work digitally rather than by memory alone. The relationship with NOMAD is direct trade, built lot by lot over an ongoing collaboration between grower and roaster.

This is a fully natural lot. Cherries are floated first, a simple sort that keeps only the densest fruit moving forward, then rested in sacks for two days in the shade so dehydration starts gradually and evenly across the batch. From there they move to raised beds for a further two days in direct sun, finishing their dry in the shade — a slower, more staged sequence than a straight sun-dry, which is generally used in natural processing to help develop sweetness while keeping fermentation under control.

The variety, Parainema, has serious pedigree: a selection from the T5296 line bred by Honduras's Instituto Hondureño del Café and released in 2004. Best suited to altitudes of roughly 700–1600 metres — well within the 1,250–1,400 metre range this lot is grown at — it's part of the Sarchimor group and carries strong resistance to coffee leaf rust and tolerance to coffee berry disease, alongside reliably high yields and large bean size — practical qualities that matter as much to a farmer like Pola as anything in the cup itself.

In the cup: raspberry and fig lead, with milk chocolate and cherry close behind, before the profile shifts toward spice, brown sugar, molasses and macadamia as it cools. Body is dense, and the acidity is smooth and sweet.

Freshly roasted by NOMAD Coffee in Barcelona and imported to the UK by ROAST EDIT Co.