Parainema 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 and fun to roast. This one, a slowly sundried natural, is deeply rich and pasty-like with sweet vanilla cream, chocolate ganache, cascara, toffee, and candied hazelnut. If you're a lover of creamy, fruit forward naturals, this one rings that bell, and doing so makes it very unique for Honduras, which exports over 5 million bags of coffee per year but very, very few naturals like this. The coffee dried for over 3 weeks on raised screens, and then had additional storage time in the fully dried cherry pod, which probably contributed to the depth and saturation of the final cup.
Hidardo Hernandez, the producer of this tiny natural lot, was born in 1992 and started processing coffee experimentally at 20 years old. He’s a fourth-generation landowner in Mercedes, a tiny but beautiful mountain town in remote Ocotepeque, right on Honduras’ border with El Salvador. The family farm, Cascaritas, is 8.5 hectares in size and today 50% of it is dedicated to organic research and varietal arabica trials—a kind of model farm for other growers in the area.
The family farm wasn’t always for coffee; the soil was originally so poor that it only really supported sugar cane, corn, and other “bad” crops (in Hidardo’s words). Soil renovation became essential for the small amount of coffee grown by his grandfather, and then mother, to thrive. After his first few years of small-scale experimentation, he decided—astonishingly—that he would build an entire cooperative, scaling his vision. With no business background, he managed to create a business plan that earned a sizable grant from the World Bank. With that money, in 2016, he built the beginnings of Cafes Especiales Merecedes Ocotepeque (CAFESMO). Now, in his early 30s, CAFESMO is established, sophisticated, and Hidardo is the leader of a local revolution in organic microlots.
The coop now represents almost 300 growers and produces 75 containers of coffee annually. Of those 75 containers, more than 60 are sold domestically in Honduras. This might seem odd but is actually common for smaller coops without their own dry mill (which CAFESMO does not have). And, if you think about it, with the C market being so high this year, and considering that domestically you can sell with less sorting 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. These microlots tend to be small, one of a kind, and seem to run nearly the entire processing flavor spectrum possible for a single producing area in Central America. We would love to buy more than we actually do every year but there is steep competition: CAFESMO’s sales can feel like a fast-paced auction every spring, with coffees selling out quickly to their buyers across Europe and Asia. Most of their buyers are European. To my knowledge Royal is one of only two CAFESMO buyers in the United States.
The parainema (“para-ee-nayma") cultivar, which Hidardo personally loves and which is the majority of Finca Cascaritas, is still mysterious to many consumers. 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.
If you’re a washed-only kind of person, we have a fully washed parainema lot from another CAFESMO farmer, Silvia. Her coffee is pretty great too.
