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Kickapoo cups across Honduras
Early in May, FLO Central America organized a tasting event in which they featured 13 Honduran coops and invited a couple North American importers/roasters to participate. Caleb Nicholes of Kickapoo Coffee traveled to Siguatepeque to take part in the event, in which he cupped 25 samples of Honduran coffee (a couple of which earned a rare 90 points on the SCAA quality scale!). He also got to venture out into the beautiful countryside, visiting the farms and communities of a couple of the participating coops. Coop Coffees doesn't currently buy coffee from Honduras but Caleb's visit certainly shows that it could be a very promising possibility!
By Caleb Nicholes
May 20 2010
Kieran Dunnan and FLO Central America put together a tasting and collaboration of FT Honduran cooperatives on May 3rd & 4th in Siguatepeque. This was a great opportunity to meet a very diverse group of cooperatives from all over the country. In all, there were 13 cooperatives present ranging in size from 2 container cooperatives all the way up to 160 container cooperatives.
Each of the cooperatives submitted multiple coffees that were cleaned and sample roasted on site with a double barrel Pinhalense sample roaster and cupped over a two day period. What was fantastic and completely unexpected was that we got to cup with 6 different Honduran cuppers (as well as TransCafe's head cupper from Guatemala) each of whom came from a different cooperative. I want to emphasize how cool this was--five of the cooperatives out of 13 present brought their cuppers along for the event. Also present was Beth from Equal Exchange as well as Isabel from Sustainable Harvest. After talking to many of these folks and visiting their cooperatives, it appears that all of the medium sized cooperatives and larger have been establishing internal quality control systems that include their own cupping labs. How exciting and revolutionary! It appears that the cooperatives are really embracing the quality model and are developing systems of production and evaluation that support clean, quality coffee.
A note about the coffees too. We tasted 25 samples of coffee that ranged from unclean, non-specialty coffees, to perhaps one of the best coffees I have tasted (90 points, evalutated both in Honduras and at our facility in Wisconsin). Overall, quality was surprisingly high with 8 of 25 samples scoring above 84 points. These are very high scoring coffees and are also very versatile for blends and espresso. Most are not quite as mild as a really nice Mexican Chiapas like Maya Vinique but have some of the same characteristics, with a little more Salvadoran character, nutty, sweet coffees with fruity characteristics and sweet acidity.
After the event, I had the opportunity to travel and visit 4 of the cooperatives that were present at the event as well as a very small cooperative in Comayagua that I am connected to through Farmer to Farmer out of Northern Wisconsin. Yes, this was a lot of driving, up to 10 hours on some days but it was worth it! The people were very nice, the landscapes were gorgeous, and the cooperatives were very diverse ranging from very small-holder farmers and minimal infastructure, to cooperatives with medium to large sized fincas, fully centralized processing, mechanical dryers (the norm in Honduras), as well as doing their own exporting.
