HONDURAS FTO FINCA EL ZAPOTE RED HONEY GRAINPRO

Coffee Background

Evangelina Matute is a member of Cooperativa Regional de Agricultores Orgánicos de la Sierra (RAOS), which was established in 1997 as the first cooperative of small and medium organic coffee producers in Honduras. She cultivates coffee on a 32 acre farm called El Zapote located in the municipality of Santa Maria. Leaf rust caused considerable damage to Evangelina’s farm but she started a nursery to replace damaged coffee trees and add additional shade trees before the 2014-2015 coffee harvest and now her farm is on a sustainable path to recover. Coffee is the main source of income for Evangelina, her husband and their 6 children. With support from RAOS, Evangelina has been able to reconfigure her micro-mill to ecologically run with very little water by using a demucilager, which controls the amount of mucilage that remains on the coffee bean after depulping without fermenting or washing the coffee. This Red Honey process lot is the result of using the demucilager to mechanically strip some of the mucilage from the bean and then place the coffee directly on raised beds to dry with a medium layer of mucilage still attached to the bean. This process has enabled Evangelina to market her coffee as a micro-lot through RAOS. In the last few years, RAOS has also invested significantly to improve its drymill installation. The facility has 2 electronic eyes running in series to color sort green coffee before export. RAOS also continues to employ women to hand sort micro-lots as the final step in preparing a coffee for export.