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We’re deeply proud to introduce this new single-origin Parainema (which is a varietal not yet seen on our menu in the 10 years we’ve been sourcing coffee!) grown by María Cáceres on her 3-hectare farm Regalo de Dios in El Paraíso, Honduras. María is 55 years old and has been producing coffee for 36 years. Her delicious single-varietal coffee was grown at 1400 MASL and washed. After being picked and pulped the same day, cherries ferment in tiled tanks for 35 to 45 hours before sun drying on raised beds for a month.
In the cup, we taste persimmon, orange wine, and clove, and a complex and tropical terroir of southwest Honduras to thank for that. The El Paraíso department hugs the border with Nicaragua, and is known for its production of cigars and corn. Yet the region’s reputation for growing coffee expanded significantly when producer Oscar Daniel Ramirez Valerio won the 2017 Cup of Excellence Award with his Parainema (also creating a global thirst for this varietal!).
Bred in Honduras by IHCAFE (Instituto Hondureño del Café), Parainema is a high-yield, dwarf-sized Arabica varietal well-adapted to medium altitudes like María’s farm, and insusceptible to coffee leaf rust. A big deal considering that in 2019, rusting wiped out ~25% of the country’s entire Arabica production. Interestingly, although its parent seed hybrid, Sarchimor (T5296), was naturally resistant to rusting, it was unstable over farming generations. This led to national breeding programs developing their own locally climate-adapted strains, such as: Cuscatleco (El Salvador), Limani (Puerto Rico), Obata (Brazil), and Parainema (Honduras).
Full traceability is important to reconcile the environmental conditions of the coffee we drink as well as understand the living conditions of the farmers who provide it, and that means confronting the economic reality of this market. Writ large, direct Canadian investment has converted sweatshop labour conditions and destructive mining operations on the ground in Honduras into monumental corporate profits and government kickbacks with little trickle-down development.
But Semilla recognizes that although the coffee industry is also extractive, it can be a site of positive change. In purchasing full lots from smallholder farmers throughout the Montecillos mountains directly (including buying 40% of María’s total harvest for the year for us at Dispatch!) offsetting the cost of dry milling and processing, and sourcing beans for the higher-earning specialty coffee market, their presence has helped to secure safer conditions and relieved vulnerable families from the burden of seeking out coyotes and agents.
