Honduras, Roger Dominguez, Parainema

Origin Roast

We Taste: St. Germain, Raspberry Candy, Hibiscus, Ruby Port, Cherry.

Origin: Honduras

Region: Marcala, La Paz

Farm/Washing Station/Mill: Finca las Acacias

Variety: Parainema

Altitude: 1,500 Masl

Process Method: Anaerobic Natural Dried on Raised Beds. 

Roast level: Origin

Roasting Notes: Coming soon.. 

Sourcing Notes: Coming soon.. 

Coffee Info/story: Roger Antonio Domínguez Márquez owns several farms in La Paz, Marcala. Roger is a young producer who inherited his father’s midsize farms, which came into the family in the early 1990s. He has three parcels of land in Marcala, all between 3–5 hectares, at good altitude for the region, above 1,300 meters. He grows a small variety of heirloom types, mostly Bourbon, Catuai, and Caturra, and he’s specific about his wet-milling and drying.

Green buyer Piero Cristiani has been working with many small-holders generally around the Marcala area including COE and in-country competition winners to find new and exciting microlots. Small-holder farmers make up the majority of Honduras's coffee sector, and every year our roster of microlots continues to grow from this country. Exceptional small lots of farm-specific coffees are purchased and differentiated on our offerings list as having both the highest quality and achieving the producers the highest prices.

 La Paz, an area famous for coffee production in Honduras, is high in elevation with cool temperatures. These factors cause coffees to ripen slowly, developing sugars that are then processed in these comfortable climates. These coffees have high fruity sweetness with flavors of berries or peach. Cafe Import's greatest relationship in this area is a 270-producer cooperative, many of which are woman producers or Organic certified. Coffees from La Paz are extremely stable, and reliable as any offering type.

For the past several years, Café Imports’s green-buying team has continued to explore relationships in Honduras, searching for just the right combination of microclimate, variety, processing, and attention to detail. We have developed strong relationships with quality-focused cooperatives such as Cooperativa RAOS, a 250-member organization in Marcala, La Paz, from which we have seen some of the most stable results and the highest potential for microlots. We are also exploring another potential microlot-development program in the southwest, near the Salvadoran border. 

While Honduran coffees still tend to live up to their reputation as “mild” (nutty, sweet, heavy-bodied but without the oomph of acidity that characterizes a fantastic Guatemalan or the dynamic profile of a top Costa Rican), we do think there is a bright future for breakout producers who are interested in committing to quality and in achieving that microlot status. From Cafe Imports