Jose Felix Posada Landaverde

Jose Felix Alberto Posada has been involved with coffee for 30 years, starting with specialty coffee in 2011. As a young farmer, he started in the timber industry. However, when a new environmental law took effect in El Salvador in 1998, he decided to switch to another industry after realizing that the forests had been destroyed and needed to be renewed and protected.

Felix started working with cattle, but it did not go well because his land needed to offer the right conditions for grazing, so he tried beekeeping, but it was challenging and not as profitable. In this search, Felix found coffee, a crop that allowed him to make his land productive. At first, he had significant doubts about the profitability of coffee cultivation because the terrain was steep and frequently windswept, so he created windbreaks to protect the plantations.

The people of La Palma were skeptical and didn’t believe in this variety, but he was determined to convince them otherwise. He sent a sample to the Salvadoran Coffee Council to determine the quality, and to his surprise, the results were positive! Therefore, he affirmed that it was a good idea to continue growing yellow Catuai.

He’s also currently growing his second favorite variety, yellow and red Pacamara. The coffee on his farm is carefully harvested; all batches are floated and then pulped on the same day, but before pulping, the coffee cherries ferment for 12 hours in clean bags. And after this process, the pulped coffee ferments in concrete for another 24 hours. Later, the coffee is slowly dried on raised beds for an average of 15 days.