This coffee is a blend of many producers in the Santa Barbara region. This includes rockstars like Margarito Herrera, Wilmer Dubon and Elder Chavez. They have many small lots throughout the harvest and we blend them to create a more harmonious, single, larger lot. It’s a blend of Pacas, Bourbon and Catuaí of coffees that are fully washed in traditional fermentation tanks.
The coffees from this region definitely have a nice fruit character, but the reason I felt this coffee would make an amazing espresso is actually the low notes I noticed in a lot of these day-lots. These low notes would range from oatmeal with brown sugar to milk chocolate covered hazelnuts. The result was a profile with a delicate fruit character, great silky body and lots of sweetness.
The coffees in Santa Barbara are very special. They are sweet, fruity, complex and super fun to drink. I travel to Honduras every year and cup every daylot of each producer - yes, that’s a lot of cupping! Sometimes it’s over 100 samples 🙂.
When I cup these many coffees, I often cup very tiny lots (i.e. less than 200 lb of green coffee) so in order to make this into a viable coffee offering on our menu, I need to find complementary coffees and group them into a single blend. This has a couple of great advantages for you: first, because we’re creating a larger lot from these tiny lots, our coffees last a few weeks as opposed to a couple of days. Second, when blending complementary coffees, often the resulting blend is better than the sum of its parts.
Now making this blend requires a lot of nuance. The coffees have to be grown around the same area and be of similar enough varietals so that the resulting density of the coffee in the blend is consistent and doesn’t have a ton of variance. If I neglected this seemingly petty detail, the blend would contain lots of different bean densities and this would make it very hard to hit a good roast. For instance, if the roast is optimized for the high density beans, the lower density ones would be over-roasted, resulting in flat or bitter flavours.
This blend consists of coffees from Wilmer Dubon, Antonio Martinez, Jose Maria Lopez, Nelson Vallecillo, Pedro Moreno, Margarito Herrera, Evin Herrera and Roselis Herrera. All of them are around the same area in El Cielito, around 1500-1700m and the varieties are Pacas, Bourbon and Yellow Catuaí. The region of El Cielito is so special to me - it’s the first coffee region I visited on my first trip to Honduras in 2011. The drive goes through banana and plantain plantations, bamboo forests, undulating hills and valleys, building up the anticipation long before hitting the village. El Cielito is home to several famous and successful coffee farms, many of whom have placed in the top 10 of the Cup of Excellence many times. Clearly, there’s something very special in this region.
