Honduras, a maturing project

Our R&D team traveled to Honduras at the beginning of March, an origin with which we have been familiar for years and where for the second consecutive year we are developing our project, based on developing our own processes and improving production based on our knowledge and experience in this and other origins.

One of the main objectives of this trip has been to strengthen relationships with the Producers, analyze and improve the Processes we carried out last year and introduce new specialty Green coffee producers to develop our recipes.

We traveled to Honduras from Guatemala. After a journey of about 08.00 hours, we arrived in Sta. Rosa of Copan to go to our partner’s laboratory and participate in a calibration tasting with their team .

The coffee cupping of 25 samples lasted about 3 hours, the results were a good calibration between the teams, with only a difference of 0.25-0.5 points between the more traditional coffees and the funkier ones, this helps us a lot to make decisions as a whole.

The next day, we visited the Cocanupol cooperative, located in the coffee-growing region of Ocotepeque. Ocotepequespecifically in the coffee-growing district of San Marcos. The board of directors of this cooperative is managed by a group of women .

Cocanupol is a small cooperative of 59 members (47 Producers and 12 Producers), who take the production from their Farms to be processed in their facilities. The cooperative has a Washed station and a dry mill; to dry the coffees they use patios and beds inside a solar dryer.

Last year we began to work with this Cooperative and to develop our coffees from the Range Terras: Yaxes and Bolomp’a and from our Range Constellations the stars Shaula, Larwag and Sargas. This year we are continuing with these coffees and hope to expand our stars by adding new producers from the Cooperative.

During our visit we conducted coffee tastings of this year’s new processes, calibrated with their Q-Lab team and met with producers to explain the results of last year’s harvest and this year’s projects.

We visitedtwo new farms of this Cooperative: El Roble and El Tanque.

We will tell you more about this Cooperative and its coffees in a future post.

Our next visit was to Marvin Bonilla, the Producer of the Farm Mi Cafetal, located in the Coffee region of Lempira, we started working with him last year in the production of our Coffee Range Terras.
This year we have improved the quality and we hope that his coffees will become part of our Range Constellations this year.

Marvin produces only Natural Process coffees, to develop our lots it is working on coffees with Natural Sleeping Bag Process.

Continuing our trip through Lempirawe met the Producer of the Farm Las Brisas with whom we will possibly work next year, Las Brisas is a very nice Farm with great possibilities.

In the afternoon we headed to the coffee-growing district of San AndresLempira), to visit new producers in this area with whom we have begun to test the processes.

During these visits we met Yolanda Guevara from the Farm La Prosperidad, she has started to carry out processes DF Washed, Natural Sleeping Bag, Anaerobic Sleeping Bag of 120 hours and Ricardo Alexander Cortez, from the Farm El Gualión who is only 24 years old, is doing some first tests of our recipes with processes Natural Sleeping Bag, Anaerobic Sleeping Bag of 120 hours, a young man with a lot of desire for change, active and open.

The next day we continued with the visit to producers, during the tour we stopped to visit a waterfall near the town of San Andres, where we could seea Farm with coffee trees of Variety Caturra with more than 60 years, a coffee forest, with perfect conditions thanks to the Moisture of the waterfall and 100% Organic but with a very bad management, the pickers told us that it is the last year of production as they are going to cut down the coffee trees.

We discussed the situation with the Farm manager and launched with them the proposal for the production of a batch of Coffee with Natural Sleeping Bag process, so we put the Farm on our watch list, we will try to save it and we will be attentive to its production!

We arrived at the Farm Brisas del Congolón where we met María Antonia Ramos Vasquez, this Producer has joined our project this year .

She and five other Producers belonging to an association of San Andres (Lempira) begin to develop our Process DF Washed, Natural Sleeping Bag, Anaerobic Sleeping Bag of 120 hours, are only the first tests but we expect incredible results.

We ended our trip almost back where we started, returning to Cocanupol to work some more on calibration, physical analysis of the grain and growing points for the Cooperative’s production structure.

Our last visit in Honduras was to Humberto Pinto of the Farm La Loma Linda with whom we have been developing coffees of our Range Terras since last year and with whom this yearwe hope to increase the quality and quantity and get him to produce coffees of the Range Constellations.

The summary of this trip is that we have shared many experiences and we have met Coffee Producers who are eager for change. We have fulfilled our objective and for this new Harvest we hope to triple the volume of our Range Constellations and incorporate new Producers.