El Durazno #3

COUNTRY: Honduras

FARM/COOP/STATION: El Durazno

VARIETAL: Wolisho, Dega

PROCESSING: Natural

ALTITUDE: 1600-2000 meters

OWNER: Francisco Alvarado

REGION: Intibuca

FLAVOUR NOTES: Dark chocolate, green grape, peanuts, grapefruit, hints of bubblegum and fruit candy.

ABOUT THE FARM

This coffee has been produced by Francisco Alvarado on his farm, El Durazno in the Honduran municipality of Masaguara. The farm is situated at 1700 masl.

Francisco and his wife cultivate exceptional coffee on their farm, El Durazno. It is truly a family effort to harvest, process, and produce their coffee. They've owned the farm for about 15 years, constantly working to enhance the quality. They've planted special coffee varieties and meticulously manage the pulping and drying process.

The Intibucà Project

Coffee from Honduras can be exceptional when sourced from the right regions and processed well. It often has more complexity, depth, and richness compared to other Central American coffees. The region of Intibucá has a lot of potential for delicious coffee, but it requires access to a market.

Our partners in Intibucá are located in the region of Pozo Negro, within the municipality of Masaguara. They are a committed group of producers led by Rony Gámez. Together, they're focused on creating a market for their coffees and establishing a reputation for the farmers. Regular meetings are held to facilitate knowledge sharing and organisation, aiming to improve their coffee quality.

Through our collaboration, we ensure traceability and separate high-quality microlots, a rarity in Honduras where small-scale farmers often lack such services, leading them to sell their coffees as a generic regional product.

The farmers deliver their parchment to a mill they collaborate with, which provides packaging and milling services. Rony, as the coffee marketer, negotiates prices with buyers and communicates them to the producers, who then decide whether to accept the offers.

The Pozo Negro coffees have well-defined fruit notes and a softer acidity, making them very accessible to a wider range of coffee drinkers.

Impact

This collective of producers is dedicating significant effort to reinvest in their infrastructure, including wet mills, drying facilities, and overall production. This is an exciting advancement, enabling better traceability and separation of high-quality micro-lots, which is uncommon among Honduran coffee producers.

Our goal in partnering with this group is to help them secure a stable market for their coffees, support their ongoing quality improvement efforts, and ultimately increase their earnings from coffee sales over time.

Rony's role in facilitating communication and managing buyer relationships allows the producers to focus on their expertise and produce high-quality coffee. An essential aspect of this partnership is the payment structure: unlike other regional transactions in the local currency, the producers receive their profits in USD after deductions for Rony's services and payments to the mill. This offers them stable income and a currency less prone to fluctuations, ensuring greater financial stability and operational flexibility.

COFFEE IN HONDURAS

Honduras is a small yet mighty coffee producer. The country boasts the largest per capita coffee production in the world. Beginning in 2017, Honduras began placing in third place for Arabica production volume globally. For this slot, they compete with Ethiopia—a country 10 times larger than Honduras. The two countries trade between third and fourth place annually, but the achievement is impressive, nonetheless.

Coffee arrived in Honduras on trading ships in the 18th century. While some small-scale farmers were growing coffee as a minor cash crop early on, banana remained the main cash crop in Honduras throughout the 19th century and into the beginning of the 20th. It was not until the late 20th century that widespread and more intensive coffee farming began.

The path to largescale coffee production has been littered with stumbling blocks for Honduran producers. In 1998, Hurricane Mitch, the second deadliest Atlantic Hurricane on record, had a catastrophic impact on coffee production in the country. In total, as much as 70% of agriculture in Honduras was destroyed. This widespread destruction led to food shortages, and damaged internal infrastructure made transporting coffee even more difficult.

Many farmers smuggled their parchment to neighboring Guatemala where they could fetch higher prices. Due to the slow recovery process, smuggling continued for several years after the hurricane struck. During that time, a lot of Honduran coffee, especially that of better quality that had the potential to fetch higher prices, was sold as Guatemalan.

More recently, Honduras has battled Coffee Leaf Rust (CLR). Like many other Central American countries, CLR began appearing in 2010, and the intensity peaked in 2012. Smallholder farmers—who compose 95% of coffee growers in Honduras—farm organically by default and with very little access to inputs that would help to minimize the impact of CLR. Furthermore, many of these farmers had aging rootstock and little access to seedlings or training in renovation practices. This meant that smallholder farmers in Honduras were disproportionally affected by the outbreak. Though the effects of CLR have lessened in recent years, the disease is still widespread and has the potential to devastate crop production, especially for smallholders.

Transport and processing infrastructure can also pose challenges. While Honduran farmers have been growing coffee as a main cash crop since the 1900s, export volumes remained small well into the 1980s, due in part to the difficulty of transportation for farmers and middlemen. This lack of infrastructure led to lower-quality production overall than in neighboring countries, which also created stigma against Honduran coffee.

It is only in more recent years that coffee production in Honduras has reached specialty levels comparable to other Central American countries, but specialty roasters are responding with enthusiasm. In 2017, a lot in the Cup of Excellence garnered the highest price ever paid for a Cup of Excellence coffee in any country: $124.50 per pound (approximately $56.50 per kg).

Above all, while Honduras increasingly offers high end microlots, what the country arguably represents overall is exceptional value. Quality has improved massively over the last 15 years, and in addition to unique specialty lots, the country offers very solid, clean blenders at very attractive prices.