Honduras Finca El Malzincal

As we embrace the Pennsylvania seasons, we want to welcome this versatile and elegant coffee from Fresvindo Hernandez. It is deliciously sweet and familiar, with an embedded deep satisfying fruit undertone. Typically, Natural process coffees yield dominating fruit flavors and are largely bogged down to their predicted flavor profiles of being overly fruit forward, however, this coffee is NOT that. It is a balanced cup that yields a spectrum of flavor. Many coffees on the market that claim to be complex are often one dimensional and easily predictable; something like an easy to pin anaerobic that has predicted flavors that fall into winey or fermented flavors. HOWEVER, this Honduras is not pegged into a single category. We found it to display a wide spectrum of flavors that change as soon as you guess them. It's like a relationship, trying to figure out who a person is only to have them change as time goes on. Complexity is just that, predicted to a certain degree, until it isn't. 

This coffee is sturdy but not so predictable. That's what we love about it! We think you will too. We got notes of chocolate drizzled cranberry, Cinnamon, Brown Sugar, Plum, and hints of Valencia orange. This coffee is versatile in being deliciously smooth and warming to the core as a drip or pour over, and zesty, punchy, and sweet as an espresso. It works best with a finer grind and longer extraction for pour overs and drip coffee makers. 

Audience: Anyone who likes coffee....

Flavor Notes: chocolate covered cranberry, Cinnamon, Brown Sugar, Plum, and hints of Valencia orange

Process: Minimal Intervention Natural

Grower: Fresvindo Hernandez | Finca El Malzincal

Region: Mercedes, Ocotepeque department, Honduras

Cultivar: Parainema & Pacas

Elevation: 1231 masl

Additional Information:

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.

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.