Honduras La Manzanita

A second-generation coffee farmer, Edgardo Tinoco grew up thinking of coffee as a simple practicality: his family produced conventional-grade coffees for the income. But that outlook changed in 2008, when our export partner flagged one of Edgardo’s freshly harvested lots as a standout among the day’s deliveries, awarding him a premium for the cup’s quality. Encouraged by this result, Edgardo began separating out microlots, and little by little his processes and outcomes improved. A few years later he took first place in Honduras’s Cup of Excellence—a country-by-country competition that has identified quality through cupping for two decades, ultimately 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. This remarkable achievement set Edgardo on a new trajectory, and ever since then he has been expanding his farm, planting different varieties, and refining his methods to hone in on consistently high-quality harvests.