Origin Spotlight: Honduras

At the outset of a new year, we’re delighted to bring Honduras back to the top of our menu with a pair of stellar microlot coffees: La Colmena and La Manzanita. These offerings come to us courtesy of San Vicente, a family-owned export operation in Honduras’s Santa Bárbara department. We’ve been purchasing coffees from this region for the past seven years, thanks to the coordination of the young operator, Benjamin Paz.

In 2016, we traveled to Santa Bárbara to meet with coffee growers and learn more about San Vicente’s microlot export operation. Later that year, we hosted Benjamin here in our Brooklyn roastery, opening our doors to the general public for an expansive coffee tasting. We’ve loved these coffees ever since.

Santa Bárbara, in the west of Honduras, claims more Cup of Excellence prize-taking producers than anywhere else in the country. (The Cup of Excellence is a country-by-country competition that has identified quality through cupping for two decades, leading the top-scoring lots to an international auction, where they often command many times the market price for a pound of raw green coffee.) Santa Bárbara doesn’t possess remarkable altitudes for a coffee-growing region, nor does it have the most sought-after exotic varieties, though some esoteric ones can be found there. There’s simply something special about the area, which we believe is related to its climatic and geographic attributes. The finest flavors found there more closely resemble some of the best coffees we’ve tasted in East Africa––much more deeply saturated, berry-forward and fruit-toned in the cup––than the neighboring regions across the Central American isthmus. We’re proud to bring you these coffees for yet another year. Enjoy.