Honduran Coffee: Back from the brink

"When you ride through the Honduran highlands, you are traveling through some of the finest coffee country in the world. Keep your eyes out for Honduran coffee; it is a bush that is often planted in the shade of larger trees. There are over 90 million Honduran coffee bushes in cultivation. Pictured here is an early, clear-cut coffee plantation7 from the turn of the century. Honduran coffee, most of which is a rich arabica coffee, is used mainly by coffee retailers as a blending coffee but Honduran coffee certainly is good enough to stand on its own. Honduran coffee growers have not been able to “brand” Honduran coffee like growers in other countries have. Walk into any grocery store and you can find a can of coffee with the tag line "100% Colombian coffee." Guatemalan and Costa Rican growers have pulled off the same type of branding in the coffee boutiques. Honduran Coffee? Not yet. But stay tuned. As (if?) the infrastructure improves in Honduras, I believe you will see Honduras moving from the back seat to the front seat."

-sidewalkmystic.com

"Honduran coffee has been absent from the top ranks of the Specialty market, but that is all changing. It has all the environmental factors on its side: soil, altitude, climate. All it's neighbors have sophisticated coffee production: Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua. But what is lacking is infrastructure, good coffee processing and transporting, capital and a distinct "name" in the consumer market. This means that even a good quality Honduran does not fetch a good price (and in fact many from Copan and Santa Barbara districts are smuggled into Guatemala and sold as such). Without a premium price for quality, the incentive for the farmer, the mill and the exporter have no incentive to incur the added expense that would realize the coffee's potential. So Honduran coffee ends up as a good mild blender, and not as a single-origin or farm-specific coffee. It is, clearly, a vicious cycle."

-sweetmarias.com

~Evan