The parainema cultivar is still mysterious to many. It has a humble origin as a very specific hybrid developed by Honduras’ national coffee organization, IHCAFE. The name itself is a portmanteau of its purposes: “Parai-” for the southern department of El Paraíso, where it was designed to be cultivated, and “-nema” for the nematodes it was designed to withstand. But seeds made their way around. In 2015 a group of mature parainema trees inexplicably grown in the Santa Bárbara department produced a batch of coffee that won the Cup of Excellence competition, astonishing many judges with intense, perfumey cups (I was one of them). Growers ever since have been planting the cultivar in farms all over the country with quality in mind. And there have been a lot of really nice results.
Silvia, the producer of this coffee, is an only child who has worked closely with her dad on the farm since she was very young. She has her own small parcel of coffee, about 0.7 hectares, but she includes her dad’s cherry in her processing a lot of the time. Her dad’s farm, Finca La Balastrera (“the ballast”), is 3.5 hectares in size and is entirely planted with coffee. The parainema for this lot came from La Balastrera and was sorted and processed by Silvia. Silvia is also a Q-grader and avid cupper, which has helped her greatly in dialing in her processing. This particular microlot was depulped and mechanically demucilaged, then fermented for a short period overnight in open tanks and dried mechanically for about 30 hours.
Silvia and her dad are members of CAFESMO, a 9-year old cooperative in Ocotepeque that puts a huge effort into microlot differentiation, giving motivated processors like her the chance to sell their best work directly to international buyers. CAFESMO stands for Cafés Especiales Mercedes Ocotepeque. The organization started in 2016 with some very generous grant money from the World Bank. It was, and still is, a totally home-grown business in Mercedes, a tiny but beautiful mountain town in remote Ocotepeque, right on Honduras’ border with El Salvador.
CAFESMO produces about 75 containers a year but only exports about 15. The first 60 are sold domestically, which is actually pretty common for smaller coops without their own dry mill. And, if you think about it, with the C market being so high this year, and considering that domestically you can sell with more defects and get paid immediately, this is actually a pretty great business model. With so much of their volume committed locally, they can focus on exporting just the best of the best: a few FTO-certified washed bulk containers, another couple containers of blended naturals, and finally, a few containers of single-farm lots like this one. Most of their buyers are European. To my knowledge Royal is one of only two CAFESMO buyers in the United States.
Fully washed Centrals are rarely Crown Jewels. Which is funny if you think about it, since nearly all coffee in Central America is washed. The circumstances of this are that any one coffee’s individuality just isn’t as obvious. Naturals and anaerobics are still pretty rare in the region, so they seem worth highlighting. I personally am really happy that this one made the cut. It doesn’t push the boundaries of coffee, but who says a Crown Jewel needs to? Doris and I loved the clarity of the cups in Silvia’s parainema—that it’s buttery and also candy-like in structure. The aromatics of lemon verbena and ripe peach most definitely would have been altered as a natural. The green coffee also has a nice narrow, pointed shape to it, which parainemas are known for, but like many “geshas”, not all of them have. It’s fun to look at, fun to roast, and very lemony and grapey in flavor.
If you’re a naturals-only kind of person, we have a natural parainema lot from another CAFESMO farmer, Hidardo, who is also the founder of the coop. That one’s pretty great too.
