Tastes like date, nougat and chocolate.
Species: Arabica
Varietal: Typica, Bourbon
Process: Washed
Region: Toriles, Comaguaya, Honduras
Altitude: 1.600 - 1.700 m.a.s.l.
Unlike many origins where high altitude regions are prized for their quality potential, the notoriously poor state of Honduras' rural roads and infrastructure makes the area's heights a challenge for coffee production. For most of the rainy season, Toriles is nearly impossible to access on anything but a motorcycle or on horseback due to the slippery mud.
This means growers in this area have very few options for the sale of their coffee - usually constrained to delivering their depulped cherries to local bodegas and receiving whatever price is offered that day, minus the transportation costs to deliver it.
The physical remoteness of the Toriles underlines their peripheral place on the supply chain, and it contributes to a lack of knowledge around the global coffee system more generally. Their distancing from this knowledge allows for large multinational exporters to dispossess them of their coffee for low prices, and reap large margins in the process. In so doing, smallholders are left not only with no capital to invest in their farms but they are also kept in the dark about information necessary to learn how to assess or improve the quality of their coffee and thereby access a specialty market.
2024 marked the first year of incorporating the Toriles smallholder group into the broader Sueños de Semilla network in Honduras, from whom we import these beans from. Since the beginning of their work in Honduras, they’ve been drawn to and interested in working in the Comayagua department because of the sheer lack of support the average smallholder sees in these areas.
Throughout the year not only did seven growers learn to process their own coffee to a specialty standard, but they were already able to achieve several micro-lots sold under their own names.
It is our hope, and the hope of Semilla Coffee, to see these same names from the Sueños de Toriles lot step out on their own in 2025, earning the recognition and compensation they have long deserved for their hard work and sacrifice.
