La Salsa Washed Geisha

Ben “Mincho” Paz is a close friend of mine. I have a lot of respect for him and what he’s done for the Honduras specialty coffee industry. Ben Paz grew up around coffee and coffee farms. His family started Beneficio San Vicente, a small exporter in Peña Blanca who started off selling commercial coffee from the small producers in the area. Over the past seventeen years, Ben, along with his brother Fidel and his cousin Arturo, have single handedly changed the coffee producing mentality in the region and are directly responsible for the wellbeing and financial success of most farmers in the Santa Barbara region.

Ben has visited coffee farms all over central and south america. So he took the best practices and seeds from top notch farms and adopted them in his farm, La Salsa. Salsa means sauce and he named it this way because the Geisha seeds in this farm are from seeds all mixed from many of these top notch farms he visited. He planted the farm in 2015 and had lots of struggles getting the farm off the ground - bad weather, bad luck, and a bit of neglect forced him to really ponder if he had it in him to commit to the kind of care and attention to detail that coffee farming requires. Thankfully, he decided to go all in on his farm, invest in better facilities and hire really strong people to help him.

The results speak for themselves. He broke through in 2021 and placed 5th in the Cup of Excellence. Then in 2022, he won the entire competition! In 2023, he finished fifth again. Then in 2024 he won again and followed the win with a 3rd place finish this year. Clearly, his coffee is truly special. It’s easily the most decorated coffee in the history of Honduras.

This coffee was washed using the traditional fermentation method. The cherries were floated and manually sorted, then the cherries were depupled and fermented in a sealed tank for 40 hours. The result is a beautiful expression of the variety, super clean and elegant.