Klatch Coffee's Mujeres de Café Returns with Las Mercedes' Finest

Lucia Ortiz wasn’t supposed to run a coffee farm. She held a marketing degree, spoke multiple languages, and co-owned a travel agency in San Salvador. Then her husband Roberto handed her the keys to Finca Las Mercedes — a 168-hectare estate in eastern El Salvador that his family had farmed for four generations — and everything changed.

That was around 2006, the same year Las Mercedes won the Cup of Excellence with the highest-scoring coffee ever recorded from eastern El Salvador. Today, Ortiz’s meticulous approach to micro-lot production has made the farm a sought-after origin for specialty roasters, including Klatch Coffee, who have sourced from Las Mercedes for nearly two decades.

The 2026 Blend

For March 2026, Klatch has assembled a new edition of its annual Mujeres de Café blend using three distinct lots from Ortiz’s farm:

• Bourbon/SL28 — the classic pairing of heritage Bourbon with the Kenyan-origin SL28 known for its bright acidity and complex fruit notes
• Yellow Icatu Honey — a hybrid variety with natural disease resistance, processed using the honey method to preserve sweetness
• Icatu Honey — a second honey-processed lot showcasing the versatility of this Brazilian-Ethiopian cross

Combining these three varietals creates layered complexity that a single-lot offering couldn’t achieve. The honey processing — where some mucilage remains on the bean during drying — adds body and sweetness, while the SL28 component brings structure and brightness.

A Farm Built on Experimentation

When Ortiz took over Las Mercedes, her marketing background shaped how she approached coffee production. She earned a cupping certification from the Specialty Coffee Association and began treating each section of the farm as a laboratory.

In her first year managing operations, she expanded production to 37 micro-lots, varying processing methods across different varietals to see what each could become. She’s famous for one particular innovation: using her crimson nail polish shade as a training tool, showing pickers exactly what color a ripe cherry should be before it leaves the branch.

That obsession with ripeness matters because under-ripe or over-ripe cherries compromise cup quality in ways no processing method can fix. Getting the pick right is the first step in producing specialty-grade coffee — and the one that’s hardest to control at scale.

The Grounds for Health Connection

Throughout March, Klatch will donate 20% of all Mujeres de Café sales to Grounds for Health, a nonprofit that has worked since 1996 to prevent cervical cancer in coffee-growing communities. The disease is disproportionately deadly in regions with limited healthcare access — exactly the kind of places where coffee is grown.

The partnership isn’t new. Klatch has supported Grounds for Health for years, but the March initiative concentrates that giving around a single product with a clear story. It’s a model that works: consumers get exceptional coffee with traceable origins, Ortiz and her team get reliable demand, and communities in coffee regions get healthcare infrastructure they wouldn’t otherwise have.

The Broader Picture

Klatch’s direct relationship with Las Mercedes goes beyond annual blends. For every pound of Las Mercedes coffee sold — not just during March — 25 cents supports community sports programs and medical clinics in the farm’s surrounding area. Ortiz established an on-farm clinic that provides healthcare to workers and their families, an investment that reduces turnover and builds the kind of institutional knowledge that improves quality year over year.

The arrangement is self-reinforcing. Better wages and healthcare attract better workers. Better workers produce better coffee. Better coffee commands higher prices. Higher prices fund better wages and healthcare. This is what sustainable direct trade looks like when it’s built for the long term rather than a single season.

Why This Matters

The specialty coffee industry talks endlessly about transparency and traceability, but those words often describe one-way information flows: consumers learning about farmers. What Klatch and Las Mercedes demonstrate is a two-way relationship where purchasing decisions create measurable impacts that loop back through the supply chain.

You can buy the 2026 Mujeres de Café blend online, at any of Klatch’s Southern California locations, or through their rotating Bru Bar pour-over program. The coffee speaks for itself — honey sweetness, balanced acidity, and the unmistakable quality that comes from twenty years of obsessive attention to detail.

But the story matters too. Behind every bag is Lucia Ortiz, crimson nails and cupping spoon in hand, turning a family inheritance into something that lifts an entire community.