The Coffee Experience at Alquimia

Alquimia Coffee is a cafe in the San Benito neighborhood of San Salvador that was ranked as the 14th best coffee shop in the world in 2025 by "The World's Best 100 Coffee Shops.” We went here to do a coffee tasting. El Salvador seemed like a good place to sample coffee. The country used to be one of the largest coffee producers in the world. While it is not anymore, it is known nowadays for producing specialty coffees from high quality beans and unique varietals.

When we entered, they asked us, “Are you here for the cafe or the experience?” Definitely “the experience.”

They offer a number of different coffee sampling experiences that you can choose from. For example, you could choose to experience one type of coffee prepared several different ways (hot, cold, etc.). Or, you could do a “natural elements themed tasting," where you could try four drinks made from different things from a coffee farm (sometimes a bean, sometimes a flower, etc.), each of which was representative of either fire, earth, wind, or water.

We just wanted to try a few different types of regular, hot black coffee and compare the flavors. They gave us the menu shown below. Each color-coded row contained two options of coffee that had been officially evaluated and classified into different tiers. You can see that two options coded in pink in the row labeled "rubi" had received 84-85 points and were classified as "very good" and that as you go down the paper each tier increases in grade up until the green row, the coffees of which are considered "extraordinary." The coffees were ranked by official catadores, or tasters, which I learned are like the coffee equivalent of a wine sommelier, so someone whose sense of taste is so fine that he or she is able to clearly distinguish the various qualities between different drinks upon sampling them.

Max decided to sample the three coffees circled in blue. I sampled the three circled in red. The one circled in green is the type that I bought to take home with me.

In the second photo below you can see that card that they gave us for writing our evaluations of the coffees. I didn't really feel confident enough in my sense of taste to actually fill my card out, though.

Raul was our barista. He guided us through the preparation and tasting process. He was great. We had each paid $30 or $35 and received three tiny cups of coffee, but we realized that we were paying more for Raul's guidance than we were for the coffee. He was really intelligent and patient, talking us through each stage and answering our dozens of questions.

First, Raul infused the coffee grounds with water. During this stage, Raul also had us smell the coffees.

Second, he taught us to push or pull the foam in each cup in order to break it from the liquid. We make sure to rinse our spoon in water before using it in another cup of coffee so as not to mix any of the flavors.

Third, we remove the foam and put it in the white cup.

Finally, we get to try the coffee. We went through several rounds of tasting our coffees. Raul helped us notice how as the coffee changed temperature (cooling down over time obviously), the flavor changed and perhaps so would our preferences. He was right. Initially, my favorite of the three coffees that I had ordered was the Eclipse. If you go above and ready the flavor profile of this coffee, you see that it has darker flavors: Cacao, chocolate, toasted malt, black tea, etc. This made sense to me. At this point, the coffee was warm. I, like many people, am accustomed to preferring darker flavors, such as hot chocolate, at high temperatures as a way of "warming myself" when the weather is cold. But then, over time as the coffees cooled, I began to prefer the third of my three options, the Elefante from Finca San Jose. If you look at the sensory profile of this one (in green on the right), you see that it has lighter flavors: Pear, plum, mango, cantaloupe, etc. Again, this made sense to me. Throughout my life, I have been conditioned to prefer lighter, fruitier flavors in cold drinks as a way of "cooling myself" when the temperature outside is hot. I hadn't really thought this much before about the way temperature affects my flavor preferences, so having this revelation thanks to Raul was pretty cool to me.