Honduras, and maybe even Central America as a whole, is more known for their washed coffees. This is changing, and this natural coffee is a banger!
There is lots of florals to it, mostly sweet red flowers like hibiscus. The coffee has a nutty side to it, but it feels luxurious and complex like a pistachio. On the fruity side, we had raisins and blueberry. The fermentation played a role for sure in the latter.
Cherries underwent a 45-hour fermentation process before being placed on a plastic-covered solar dryer for 20 to 25 days.
A perfect black filter coffee with a little funkiness, and it can make a beautiful and complex cappuccino as well.
Coffee growing in this region is the primary source of income and sustenance for countless families, including Geovany, who has spent a lifetime growing coffee. His grandparents and parents cultivated coffee, and he started his coffee learning on the farm when he was 10 years old. Fuelled by passion and a lifetime of experience, he continues working with coffee, even as challenges mount—labour shortages, rising pests and diseases, and low coffee prices.
Semilla's work in Honduras is almost inclusively in a series of hamlets stretched along the peaks of the Montecillos mountain range that crosses La Paz and Comayagua departments, and in these areas, the smallholder growers they buy from have been involved in coffee growing as a principal income source for years if not generations.
Many growers have explained to them that the prices they've receive in the conventional model are simply not high enough to generate profits. This is a common refrain heard in Honduras these days, that coffee farming at best can generate enough money to pay the pickers and the input costs but often fails to do even that.
That is why we are happy to work with Semilla: they pay more than double what the ''market'' would have paid those farmers. (see our transparency report for more)
Over the last 15 years, the Canadian government has impacted the trajectory of Honduran democracy to create favourable conditions for Canadian corporations within the country, often to the detriment of the Honduran people. Buying coffee consciously is a small but powerful way to try to undo those imperialist efforts.
