Story
For four years, we've sourced from central Honduras in the Sierra de Montecillos mountains thanks to our import partners Semilla Coffee and their long-standing relationship with a community of growers in and around the San Miguel de Selguapa village of Comayagua department. This year we bought the lion’s share, a silky sweet, creamy microlot blend with notes of fresh orchard fruit called “Sueños de Selguapa” harvested by three producers from the town of Selguapa: Adonis Argueta, Elder Castillo, and Atanacia Ramirez. In the cup, we taste anjou pear, cane sugar, and halva.
Meaning “dreams of Selguapa,” this name (self-titled by the producers in the community) affectionately references the aspirations and hard work that has begun to pay off year-by-year with more farming families in the region earning sustainable, even profitable wages for the first time in generations.
Honduras is the world’s 8th largest coffee exporter, which in 2022 brought in over $2 billion CAD and has only risen since. Even as deep into the mountains as Comayagua, opportunities in the specialty market are growing with prices per quintal of parchment coffee reaching 6,000 Lempira ($330 CAD) at la plaza. But with arduous journeys to a selling point, intermediaries taking a cut, and a lack of support if something goes wrong, how attainable is that growth to the farmers themselves? And in a country with heaps of competing foreign interests, what strings are really attached to that growth?
The population of San Miguel de Selguapa is around 1,500 and most here grow coffee by trade, yet the scales of power tip in the other direction dramatically. Most families at some point will see members migrating north for better work, or have to reconcile with offers from Canadian and US companies to sell their land for livestock or mass monocultural agriculture. It’s our goal to make legacy land stewardship a desirable way to make a living again.
Even as Semilla matches increasing lot purchasing prices, it’s not just about one-off sales; sustainable growth means stronger relationships, increased production quality, and ecological preservation. In light of this, Semilla’s direct investment eschews the top-down pricing model in favour of open-consensus communication with farmers, sets fixed prices not tied to harvest cup quality, and reclaims the status quo of foreign involvement to benefit those at the bottom as opposed to serving only those at the government or corporate levels.
This isn’t the only reason we’re so excited for this speciality blend of Bourbon and Caturra to return to our menu each winter. Grown with care at 1800 MASL in ideal natural conditions for Arabica varietals, cherries are harvested at peak ripeness and depulped immediately. They are dry fermented for 30 hours under shade, washed in clean water, and then dried on raised beds in the sun for around 25 days. All of which helps make “Sueños de Selguapa” a dream come true.