WATTS WORKS - HONDURAS 2003

I am pleased to announce the arrival of two new coffees from Honduras, the first that we've offered from this country. Before getting into the descriptions, I would like to give you a little background. Honduras is a country that is located in the heart of one of the best coffee-growing areas in the world. It shares borders with El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua-three of the premier Central American coffee origins-and the areas along these borders have produced many of the winning coffees from recent Cup of Excellence competitions.

Unfortunately, lack of processing infrastructure and historical neglect by the specialty industry have conspired to hold the quality of the coffees down, and most of what has come out of Honduras in the past ten years has been poorly sorted, commercial-grade coffee that gets sold to larger roasters and blended into obscurity. Very few roasters in the US have Honduras on their offering sheets, and if you were to ask ten roasters what they think of coffee from Honduras you would likely be told that it is not very good.

Whose fault is that? Well, you could blame Honduran exporters for not encouraging growers to implement quality focused processing techniques; you could blame the Honduran Coffee Board for not providing enough technical support to small growers. You could also point a gnarled finger at US importers for not teaching Honduras about the specialty movement and giving them the incentive to invest in their future by connecting with specialty roasters. And you can blame US roasters for accepting opinions and biases regarding Honduras coffee that are the result of economics-based market forces and circumstance rather than logic and reason.

The fact is exceptional coffee can be produced anywhere that has the right combination of altitude and climate...Mother Nature is very good at growing tasty coffee cherries. Quality usually gets lost because buyers don't want to pay the extra costs of preserving greatness, and farmers don't understand the potential value of what they are growing. The sad reality is that the coffee world likes having a source of very low-priced, flavorful high-grown coffees to pack into their blends. As the premiums for Guatemalan, Costa Rican, and Nicaraguan coffees have slowly risen, many roasters who want to spend next to nothing for their coffees have turned to Honduras, and none of them seem very interested in helping this country reach its true (and stunning!) potential.

Dionisio Sanchez, a farmer in Honduras checks the moisture content of his parchment coffee.

Fortunately, there are some folks who have been reaching out with good advice. This spring Honduras hosted a coffee competition, in the manner of The Cup of Excellence, to isolate some of its best coffees of the 2003 crop and bring some international attention to its infant specialty sector. With another roaster from Intelligentsia, Chris Schooley, I was invited to attend as a judge. We had the good fortune of tasting some fantastic coffees over three days of intensive cupping. Of the top five finishers, only one coffee was actually available for purchase, and this is one of our new offerings. The other is a coffee from a different growing region called Intibuca, and is partially responsible for our decision to go to Honduras.

We tasted it several weeks before the competition and were so impressed by the depth of flavor in the cup that when the invitation came to attend the event it would have taken a jail cell and twenty armed guards to keep me away. So as you taste these coffees, think about them as a new beginning for a country that has been overlooked for too long, and which deserves as much attention as any of its well-respected neighbors. If you talk with people who think Honduras has low quality, ask them why they think that and tell them the time has come to re-evaluate...

Intibuca (southwestern Honduras, located slightly north of El Salvador)
This is the coffee that piqued our interest in Honduras prior to our visit. It is also a coffee that caused more than one taster to step back and exclaim! Extremely rich and deep, with a thick, creamy body, there is certainly no lack of complexity here. Take a few sips and you will be immediately impressed by the smooth, silky, and somewhat spicy character loaded with notes of semi-sweet chocolate and cocoa, vanilla bean, and almond butter. The coffee has a softness to it that will please coffee lovers who like bass and mid-range tones, and finishes rather cleanly for a coffee of such substantial girth. Worth noting is that the coffee scored an impressive 90 points in a recent edition of Ken David's Coffee Review.

Acidity: moderate
Body: big, rich, and creamy
Flavor notes: cocoa/semi-sweet chocolate, almond butter, spice, vanilla bean, caramel.

Ocatepeque (far west, sandwiched between the Guatemalan and El Salv. Borders)
This one took fourth place overall in the Honduras competition, and offers a much different experience than the Intibuca. Where the Intibuca is a rich, bass-driven goliath, the Ocatepeque is a superbly balanced and clearly articulated mid-to-high range symphony. Our tasters described this coffee as ripe, bright, clean and juicy. I was impressed by sweet notes of apricot and cherry, along with a lovely Belgian chocolate aftertaste. Refreshing and exceptionally well structured, with great clarity, this is a coffee for those who like their cup slightly more delicate and higher-toned.

Acidity: bright, balanced
Body: medium, clean
Flavor notes: apricot, cherry, Belgian chocolate, very ripe and sweet, juicy.