Team CAFESMO
Our tasters
Idalia Josselin Santamaría
Actually, my roots are in El Salvador, but that goes back too many generations to remember. So I'm 100% Honduran, and I'm proud of it!
"Like many of our producers and most of my co-workers, I grew up in San Marcos, the town closest to our Cafesmo facilities.
It's a small but very dynamic city, and almost everyone is directly connected to coffee, or is related to someone who is. If it weren't for coffee, our city would lose its "raison d'être."
When I started working at Cafesmo, I was hired as a quality control assistant. Among other things, it was my responsibility to maintain traceability, collect and store samples, and, if I was lucky, participate in tasting sessions to help evaluate the quality of different batches.
At first, I didn't understand much. The jargon was strange, and sometimes I couldn't share the enthusiasm for high-end coffees, simply because I lacked experience and wasn't able to appreciate the complex profiles. But those tasting sessions sparked my fascination, and I quickly became interested in learning more.
Fortunately, Cafesmo's taster at the time, Sylvia Ventura, generously shared her knowledge and experience with me. Soon I was invited to all the cupping sessions, and then Cafesmo offered me the opportunity to take the Q-grader course at our national coffee institute. Since then, I haven't stopped learning, and of course, I've come to appreciate complex coffees, fermentation processes, and much more.
For example, we're currently experimenting with adding yeast during the fermentation of our grains. I'm participating in a course taught by Lucía Solis, the renowned expert, to learn how we can further improve the stability, uniformity, and consistency of our batches.
Personally, I'm a fan of carbonic maceration processes. Preparing these coffees is risky because they can over-ferment and lose much of their quality, but most of the time these micro-lots come out of the barrel in great shape, and the reward of the profile is well worth the risk: intensely fruity, often vinous, descriptors, complex structures—dazzling for the taste buds!
But of course, I'm not spending all day tasting coffees or experimenting in our wet grinder. A large part of my job involves administrative tasks: I have to keep track of all our different batches. The quality, the volume, the defects, the harvest date, the farm, the certificates, and so many other details. So we have a system that automatically syncs all the information between me, our accountant, the quality control department, technical support, and our CEO. Each batch has a unique number, and all the relevant information is stored and shared through this system.
I also keep physical samples of every coffee we taste. This is important because coffee evolves over time, so it's crucial to taste it again after a few weeks or even months. Additionally, we want to keep a sample in case we receive feedback from a buyer that doesn't align with our own conclusions. This is rare, but when it happens, it's vital that we can easily find the original coffee sample we shared with the customer.
I've never traveled to any of the countries where we sell our coffees, though I hope to someday. But some of our partners send us a complimentary bag of roasted coffee, and sometimes they even include a bag from another origin, from an African or Asian country. Those are the best gifts, because there aren't many opportunities to try coffees from other continents.
What I do know very well are all the aspects involved in coffee cultivation at the source. In fact, my father is a coffee farmer, and I've been going to our farm since I was little. He taught me the fundamentals of coffee farming; I learned about harvesting, farm maintenance, cleaning, washing, and coffee preparation long before I was an adult.
And now I have my own piece of land, where I also grow coffee. My family helps me a lot with that, because being a coffee taster at Cafesmo is a full-time job, but I'm responsible for preparing my own batches and, of course, I also take care of quality control.
In my free time, I enjoy playing football, I love reading books (although they're hard to find in my town), and I also sing in our local choir. So I have plenty of hobbies to keep me busy, although the truth is, my job is my biggest hobby!
