The town of Mercedes, where Fresvindo’s farm is located, is within eyesight of Honduras’ border with El Salvador. Labor and information have always flowed pretty freely in the region and coffee is no exception: since El Salvador had a booming export market for coffee long before Honduras’ own market developed, much of the original cultivation knowledge, and the very seeds themselves that established coffee in Honduras, came from El Salvador.
Fresvindo’s grandfather was part of his own local coffee wave, being one of the first in this part of Ocotepeque to plant coffee and know something about how it should grow. Today, Fresvindo is himself a grandfather, with a coffee parcel of only a single hectare that he has spent his entire adulthood cultivating. While he’s content to let his coffee-farming kids do the “heavy work” as he says, despite his advanced age Fresvindo still happily oversees the drying of his own microlots.
This very small lot of coffee from Fresvindo’s farm is a mixture of pacas, a vintage Salvadorian cultivar related to bourbon, and parainema, a modern Honduran sarchimor. It's a natural process but a light and juicy result with strawberry and cherry, a bit of sweetened balsamic vinegar, sugar cane, and chocolate.
Fresvindo and his wife Rosa are members of CAFESMO, a 9-year old cooperative in Ocotepeque that puts a huge effort into microlot differentiation, giving motivated producers like them 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.
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.
Parainema (“para-ee-nayma") is a really interesting cultivar to me right now. This one 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. Parainema 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.
So, the particular farm blend from Fresvindo represents the past and future of Honduras coffee: pacas from El Salvador, an old naturally occurring mutation of bourbon, itself one of the oldest varieties in Latin America; and parainema, one of the latest successful lab-grown hybrids in Honduras’ now enormous cultivation industry. A historic Mercedes family, a thought-provoking blend of genetics, and a really nice natural process.
