This Year’s Honduran Single Origins
Coffees to Drink Every Single Day
Our Honduran coffees have just started hitting our menu, and we couldn’t be more excited to share them. Sweet, complex, and expressive, the single origins we offer each year come from two sources, Catracha Coffee Company in Santa Elena and a quartet of producers working with San Vicente Dry Mill on Santa Bárbara Mountain. While we always prioritize building relationships with producers in any country, in Honduras, we buy each and every coffee from producers we know. This direct link back to the people responsible for such stunning single origins makes their coffees all the more meaningful.
In March 2020, Kyle Evans, Blue Bottle Coffee Logistics Specialist and member of our Green Coffee Team, traveled to Honduras to visit them. In a recent conversation, he shared more about this year’s coffees and updates on the inspiring producers behind them.
For a newcomer to single origins, what are the qualities you love most about coffees from Honduras?
The sheer diversity of flavor profiles coming out of Honduras is really exciting. But while Honduras is a powerhouse producer, at Blue Bottle our focus is on two producing groups in two regions, Santa Elena and Santa Bárbara Mountain. Each group offers coffees that are really satisfying and special, but in different ways. Single origins from Santa Bárbara are really exciting. Acid-forward profiles make them expressive, and they’re often recognized as outliers for the country, winning Cup of Excellence competitions. Single origins from Santa Elena’s Catracha Coffee Company are really sweet and rich with butterscotch and chocolate notes. I’d say what they have in common is approachability—a quality that makes you want to drink the coffee every day.
Say a little more about approachability. What does that mean?
I guess I mean that even the acidity I speak of in the Santa Bárbara coffees is clean tasting yet noticeable enough to keep you coming back time and again. Same goes for the coffees from Catracha Coffee Company in Santa Elena. Yes, they have unique and pronounced flavors, but they’re so pleasing and balanced that you could drink them all day long.
On your trip to Honduras in March 2020, you visited all of the producers we buy from in the country. Is this unusual?
Blue Bottle’s buying practices are based, to the extent possible in each origin country, on relationships with producers. But in Honduras, our coffees are 100 percent relationship-based. It’s this traceability that I value most.
In Santa Bárbara Mountain, we work mainly with Benjamin Paz, from the San Vicente Dry Mill in Peña Blanca. He kind of acts like our liaison to the four farmers we buy from: Cristobal Fernandez, Ana Letis Reyes, Juan Angel Fernández, and Jobneel Caceres.
In Santa Elena, we work with Catracha Coffee Company, run by Mayra Orellana-Powell and Lowell Powell. They’re one of our longest relationships, and their work to connect farmers who once grew commodity coffee to the specialty market doesn’t just mean exporting. It means helping to guide their community toward specialty standards.
Most years we release two coffees from Catracha, one showcasing an individual producer and one sourced from the entire community. Can you tell us a little more about what is going on there?
Mayra and Lowell are not just exporters. They’re community organizers creating skill-building workshops and researching best practices so that farmers can improve coffee quality. Their entire focus is on building community. On this trip, I spent most of my time accompanying Lowell. He is incredibly busy, buying and roasting coffee for farmers to sell at local markets and partnering with farmers to find practical solutions to problems they may have. One example of this is the honey processing that Catracha is experimenting with. We just featured a honey coffee from producer Denis Marquez. They started honey processing for the simple reason that some farmers, like Denis, don’t have enough water to wet process their harvest. The solution requires investment, but it addresses the most pressing problem between a producer and the specialty market. That’s how Lowell works.
Mural by Catracha Coffee community members
Santa Bárbara Mountain is a very different place. Describe it for us and the role that San Vicente, the dry mill, plays in connecting producers to buyers like us.
Benjamin Paz took me to meet all of the producers we work with. San Vicente Mill, like Catracha, is very community-minded, working one-on-one with producers. But Santa Bárbara’s landscape is a world apart from Santa Elena. It was really rainy when I went there, whereas Santa Elena was so dry that dust was everywhere. Honduras’s largest lake, Lago de Yojoa, is at the foot of the mountain, creating a dramatic, beautiful scenery.
Jobneel Caceres and his wife Fanny have the largest projects on their plate. They are incredibly ambitious, with plans to set up a washing station and expanding cultivation onto newly purchased land.
Ana Letis’s land is hard to access, it’s at such high elevation. A humbling moment for me was seeing Ana nimbly walk her property in Crocs while I stumbled in my sturdy hiking boots. Ana has reinvested some of the profits she made from a premium we paid for her coffee last year, buying a new truck and more land.
Producer Ana Letis Reyes and Kyle Evans, Blue Bottle Coffee Logistics Specialist
You visited Honduras just before Covid-19 changed everything. How has it impacted the producers we work with?
Honestly, it’s a miracle that coffee left there at all. Once Covid hit, there were incredibly tight restrictions on travel. At the dry mills, where dried coffee is cleaned and prepared for export, fewer people could be working at one time, slowing down the process considerably. It’s been so hard for everyone involved, but on our side, the arrivals have been seamless.
Added to this, two back-to-back hurricanes also devastated Santa Bárbara Mountain in November 2020. Landslides took out homes and farms, including Cristobal’s home, one of the farmers we work with. Benjamin is focusing on helping those farmers with San Vicente who have no backup.
What excites you about the coffee scene in Honduras in the years to come?
Innovation is happening all over Honduras toward improving cup quality. We certainly continue to see dazzling washed coffees coming out of competitions like Cup of Excellence. But it’s happening on the ground level, too. After leaving Santa Elena, Lowell and I stopped by IHCAFE, an agricultural nonprofit that focuses on improving coffee quality for Honduran farmers. While there, we got the chance to cup coffees that were experimentally processed. In the next year or two, I think that we will see some really fun and exciting processing experiments coming out of Honduras. And that has already been coming true for some of the producers we work with—like this year’s honey-processed coffee from Denis Marquez of Catracha.