Aida Batlle is a fifth-generation coffee farmer and a first-generation coffee celebrity. On the steep hillsides of the Santa Ana Volcano, in western El Salvador, she produces beans that trade on the extreme end of the coffee market, where a twelve-ounce bag may cost twenty dollars or more and comes accompanied by a lyrical essay on provenance and flavor. These beans have made Batlle an object of obsession among coffee connoisseurs and professionals—the coffee equivalent of a European vigneron—and she is willing to play the role, if it helps raise coffee’s status. Talking about coffee makes her happy; even her complaints are enthusiastic. “There are hundreds of Cabernets, and that’s O.K.,” she says. “Coffee should be the same way—they all taste different!” In a small but growing number of cafés, you can order coffee more or less the way you might order wine, specifying the varietal and the region and the farm; for the price of a glass of house red, you will receive, if you’re lucky, a cup of drip coffee that is mellower and weirder than the astringent beverage most people know. Perhaps you will detect a hint of gingerbread, or a honeyed aftertaste, or a rich, tangy sweetness that calls to mind tomato soup. And perhaps you will find it difficult to go back to whatever you used to drink.

Batlle, a coffee producer who is also a connoisseur, conducting a coffee taste test, an exercise known as a cupping. Photographs by Alessandra Sanguinetti / Magnum

During the Salvadoran civil war, which lasted from 1980 until 1992, the Batlle family took refuge in Miami, which is where Aida Batlle grew up. After trying and forsaking college, she settled, with her husband, in Nashville, and sometime after her marriage fell apart she realized she had no good reason to stay there. She was twenty-eight, managing a restaurant and catering company, and she thought she might be more useful in El Salvador. Her father, Mauricio, was struggling: the price of coffee had reached a record low, and he was losing money with every harvest.

She arrived in Santa Ana, the country’s scruffy second city, in 2002, only vaguely acquainted with the business and practice of coffee farming. She knew that the family land had potential, because of its high altitude and rich volcanic soil. And although she had never actually drunk a cup of Batlle coffee, that wasn’t unusual—there was no such thing. Her father sold his crop to the local mill, which mixed it with crops from nearby farms and exported the product as a generic Salvadoran coffee blend. He gave his daughter control, assuming that, no matter what she did, the mill would still purchase whatever the farms produced.

Coffee is a fruit—the beans are seeds that develop, in pairs, within the gumball-size cherry. Batlle’s idea was to treat her coffee the same way her local Wild Oats supermarket in Nashville had treated fruit: she would grow the plants organically and pick only cherry (coffee people never pluralize “cherry”) that was ripe and healthy-looking—the ones she would want to eat. (During harvest, she often snacks on coffee cherry, which has a mild, watermelonlike sweetness and some caffeine.) Because she was a novice, and a woman, she faced no small amount of skepticism from her farm managers—more than one worker responded to her requests by asking, “Where’s your father?” Eventually, they realized that her requests were directives: at one point, she threatened to fire a farm manager unless he agreed to send his kids to school. Batlle occasionally startled the cherry pickers by diving in alongside them to show them what she wanted done and, to a lesser extent, to help. She is an accurate picker, but not a quick one. Although Batlle didn’t quite realize it, her approach to coffee farming was deeply peculiar—she was coddling a crop that has, for centuries, been subjected to rough treatment. (Why worry about the succulence of the cherry if all you really care about is the pit?) But she arrived in El Salvador just as a new international coffee movement, drawn to beans and stories like hers, was cresting.

For much of the twentieth century, coffee was marketed under brand names that promised reliability: consumers knew that their next cup of Folgers—or, for that matter, their next cup of Starbucks—would taste just like last month’s, or last year’s. By the late nineteen-nineties, more roasters were deëmphasizing blended coffee in order to highlight the singular virtues of their favorite beans. In 1999, a cohort of coffee professionals created the Cup of Excellence, a series of national competitions designed to identify and reward exceptional farmers. Experts would conduct a blind coffee taste test, known as a cupping, and the winning beans would be sold through an online auction. El Salvador’s inaugural Cup of Excellence competition was held in 2003, and Batlle decided to enter. Coffee from Finca Kilimanjaro, one of her farms, impressed the panel of judges, which included Geoff Watts, of Intelligentsia Coffee, the influential Chicago-based roaster and café operator.

Central American coffees tend to taste rich and chocolaty. Kilimanjaro had some of the rich sweetness that judges expected, but it also had what professionals call “brightness”: a tart, fruity flavor more commonly associated with Kenyan coffee. Batlle was relieved to discover that she liked her own product, even though she didn’t know why. “I knew I was tasting something, but my brain could not identify it,” she says. Kilimanjaro won the competition, and at auction a Norwegian roaster paid $14.06 a pound for it, a record at the time. The open-market price was less than a dollar a pound.

The auction earned Batlle almost forty thousand dollars, which helped her convince her father that there were eager buyers for coddled coffee. More important, the publicity introduced Batlle to the coffee buyers she calls the “dream team”: Peter Giuliano, the scholarly co-owner of an idealistic North Carolina company called Counter Culture Coffee; Thompson Owen, the mad scientist behind Sweet Maria’s, in Oakland; and Duane Sorenson, the pugnacious founder of Stumptown, in Portland, Oregon. All of them understood Batlle’s conscientious farming—and they were willing to pay enough to allow her to keep at it. She had stumbled upon a community of people who cared almost as much about her farms as she did.

A worker prunes a shade tree over the coffee plants on one of Batlle’s farms in El Salvador.

One warm morning this summer, Batlle drove up the side of the volcano in her off-road vehicle, a Toyota FJ Cruiser, to check on her farms. For most of the twentieth century, El Salvador was one of the biggest coffee producers in the world. But the Salvadoran coffee business still hasn’t recovered from the civil war, and today El Salvador exports less than half as much coffee as it did in 1975. In this diminished industry, Batlle is a visible symbol of rebirth, although the visibility comes at a cost. El Salvador is smaller than Massachusetts, with about as many people, and it has one of the world’s highest rates of violent crime. So Batlle travels with at least three companions: two armed guards and one extraordinarily well-trained German shepherd, Chief, who seems to be saving up all his barking for a sufficiently critical situation. On that morning, though, crime presented a less immediate danger than the washed-out dirt road. “Back when coffee ruled El Salvador, my great-grandfather used to be able to drive up here in a Buick,” Batlle said. She now requires not just her FJ Cruiser, with its row of four-wheel-drive controls (she calls them her “magic buttons”), but also a pair of black Harley-Davidson gloves so that she doesn’t get blisters from squeezing the steering wheel.

It is possible to grow coffee near sea level, just not very good coffee. The rigors of elevation—lower oxygen levels, colder nights—force the plants to grow more slowly, creating harder, denser beans that produce the vibrant, slightly acidic flavors that are generally considered indispensable to a great cup. It was June, a month or two after harvest, and the farms bore few obvious signs of agricultural enterprise. Waist-high coffee plants with vinelike branches grew in no discernible pattern; they covered a hillside so sheer that pickers sometimes have to be lowered on ropes. (Batlle pays her pickers eight cents a pound, more than twice the going rate, because her exacting standards mean that everything takes longer.) Tall fruit trees, jocotes de corona and pepetos peludos, provide shade, which retards the ripening of the coffee cherry and intensifies the flavor of the beans; in some areas, sturdy copalchí trees form a wind curtain, letting breezes through but protecting the plants from damage. As Batlle’s truck arrived at a small farmhouse, the farm manager appeared: a lanky man in a camouflage Superman T-shirt, with two machetes hanging at his back.

The coffee plant is native to the part of Africa that is now Ethiopia. By the fifteenth century, traders and thieves were planting it farther afield. It spread through the Arab world to India, to Southeast Asia, and, largely through a French colonial officer in the early seventeen-hundreds, to the Caribbean and the Americas. In El Salvador the small farmers, much romanticized by coffee fanatics, are often small landlords, some of whom don’t have much interest in agronomy. But Batlle’s managers have grown accustomed to her daily visits and detailed questions. Perhaps she didn’t seem intimidating at first: she is a small, friendly woman who wears jeans and a T-shirt whenever possible, and she has a shy smile, although her shyness dissolves whenever talk turns to coffee, as it always does, often at her instigation. She hates public speaking, but she excels at chatting up strangers, many of whom find themselves peering at photographs of coffee plants on her iPhone.

Batlle’s farms are dominated by a temperamental but fertile cultivar called bourbon (pronounced “bour-BONE”), a member of the arabica species named for the Indian Ocean island of Réunion, formerly known as Bourbon, where it thrived. Bourbon came to El Salvador more than a hundred years ago, acquired from Guatemala by the governor of Santa Ana Province, Narciso Avilés, Batlle’s great-great-grandfather. She waded into a copse where spindly bourbon plants grew alongside a newer hybrid, pacamara. Batlle’s heterogeneous inventory is partly a result of El Salvador’s complicated history: civil war interrupted the national coffee industry at a time when other Central American countries were replacing their bourbon plants with hardier hybrids; as a result, in El Salvador more of the old varieties survived. “To me, these bourbons have always been ballerinas—tall, elegant,” Batlle said, fondly. “These pacas are more like gymnasts—short and stumpy.” As she left one farm, she called the manager over and pointed to some bourbon shoots. “Treat them with love and kindness, please,” she said.

In order to have her coffee certified organic, Batlle must pay for annual inspections, which often lead to further expenditures. One year, the inspector noticed that a neighbor had cows, and Batlle had to erect fences to keep the nonorganic cows (and their nonorganic dung) away from her plants. Because she can’t use chemical herbicides, she is always looking for organic alternatives. “I tried the natural one, made from clove oil and cinnamon oil—it’s called Weed Zap,” she said, shaking her head. “Nothing. The weeds were like, ‘Hey, thanks for this!’ ” At Finca Kilimanjaro, where workers were digging small holes to replant one slope with juvenile bourbon plants, she spied a white speck in the dirt, picked it up, and summoned an overseer. “La gallina ciega,” she said—she was holding in her palm a tiny beetle larva, curled up into a ball. “They eat the roots,” she said. “They’re horrible.” Coffee plants also manufacture their own pesticide: a chemical that is toxic to some small organisms and mildly intoxicating to larger ones. For many coffee drinkers, that chemical—caffeine—is all that matters. The beverage, in its humblest incarnation, is little more than a pesticide delivery system.

As Batlle drove higher up the hill, blasting Eminem, the climate shifted. At fifty-three hundred feet, which is about as high as coffee will flourish, the air was cool, and leafy bushes had given way to spindly cypress trees. The truck came to a stop on a neat lawn next to a house that looked out over the valley to Santa Ana and beyond. This was Los Alpes, the family’s highest-altitude farm. Next to the main house was a rectangular patch surrounded by the remains of concrete walls. It had been one of the family houses, and it was burned down during the civil war. Batlle experienced the violence of the eighties only indirectly, through the brutal and surreal things she saw during her occasional visits to El Salvador. “It sounds bad,” she said, “but you get used to seeing dead bodies by the side of the road.”

Batlle has been back in El Salvador for almost a decade, but she lives like an expatriate—when she talks about home, she often means Miami. In Santa Ana she doesn’t drink the water, and she keeps her distance from the roadside venders selling pupusas and corn on the cob. She almost never goes to San Salvador, except for meetings or flights. “I do need to have more of a personal life,” she says. “But my problem is I don’t miss it.” Her passions include the rapper Flo Rida and the video game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, which she plays online, using a screen name one of her nephews came up with: coffeerockstar.

As she toured her farms, Batlle was distracted by a series of e-mails and phone calls. Her father had died a few weeks before; Mauricio Batlle had been seventy-two. There were lawyers and documents that needed Batlle’s attention, and decisions that only she could make. She had learned her father’s business just in time to succeed him. Back in town, inside a family compound ringed by a fifteen-foot-high wall, Batlle showed off the small office that she had shared with him. The room was dominated by his desk, and was full of mementos, including a hand-drawn map of the family farms from 1938. On a small table in one corner, there were nearly fifty bags of her coffee, from roasters around the world, most accompanied by testimonials. From a 2008 Stumptown offering: “Aida Battle’s relentless focus on picking perfectly ripe cherry during the harvest and her flawless processing . . . are virtually unmatched and evident in the cup.” When she first saw that blurb, she dispatched a friendly e-mail to Stumptown, both to say thanks and to point out politely that someone had misspelled her last name.

Most coffee farmers don’t fact-check their clients’ promotional material, but these clients are Batlle’s peers and her closest friends. Her success has to do with culture as well as agriculture: she speaks unaccented English, she isn’t intimidated by coffee connoisseurs, and she understands foodie culture in the global North. Plenty of farmers have great land and great cherry, but almost none of them share Batlle’s keen understanding of what her customers want to drink, what they want to hear, and what they’re willing to pay.

The commodity-market price of coffee, known as the C, hit a modern-era low of around forty cents a pound in late 2001, just before Batlle arrived in Santa Ana. When she got there, she encountered a slew of programs designed to help producer countries capture more of coffee’s value, including the Cup of Excellence competition. During the down market, nonprofits and coöperatives often made common cause with importers and roasters, all of whom wanted to keep coffee farming viable. A patchwork of certifications, such as Fair Trade and Rainforest Alliance, assured farmers higher prices in exchange for specific economic or environmental practices. (Coffee inspires people to think about it while they sip, which explains why the demand for ethically farmed coffee is much higher than, say, the demand for ethically farmed sugar or bananas.) At first, Batlle could afford to ignore the fluctuations of the C, because her crop was worth so much more. At boutique cafés, there was no incentive to lower prices—customers liked the idea of paying a premium for a premium cup, especially if the cup came with a story about a plucky farmer’s daughter and her organic experiments.