Honduran Cup of Excellence 2008 - Las Amazonas
Yesterday was the online auction for the 2008 Honduras Cup of Excellence competition, and Fratello Coffee is happy to say, that we have won another Lot of coffee, and are the ONLY Canadian company to win one. This is always an exciting process, and is particularly long, when you are also one of the 26 judges from around the world to actually participate in the competition at origin.
The judging process is a 4 day cupping extravaganza that allows you to taste the best coffees that country has to offer. It starts out with the national cupping jury to taste all the entries and separate all the coffees that score an 84 or higher.
The next event bring the international jury into to rank all of these coffee to pick the final farms that qualify as a Cup of Excellence coffee (again anything over 84). Every coffee gets tasted by each judge from 4 – 12 times and will be scored, and described each time. Very tiring, but very rewarding.
When you walk away from the competition, you have experienced the best of this country as well as had the opprotunity to discover many different micro regions that had never been descovered until this time.
Honduras boarders Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua, and many of the coffee from Honduras will resemble those regions giving you a very diverse range of coffee profiles. From Strawberry’s, to Caramel to Lime. We learned to expect anything!!
Yesterday Fratello chose to buy the Lot – Erzi Moises Herrera Urizar – Las Amazonas.
The Jury Descriptions for this coffee included everything from:
creamy body, almond, marzipan, apricot, clean lime, red apple, coconut aroma, good structure (complex), vanilla aromas, black cherry, apricot, dried apricot.
This coffee is 100% Catura and was grown at an elevation of 1500 meters in the La Paz region. This is a fully washed coffee, that was sun dried. The farmer Erzi Moises Herrera Urizar has owned his farm Las Amazonas since 1992 after working for a coffee exporter in Guatemala. He now runs this farm with his two sons, and wife that has been in coffee for the past 50 years.
Erzi only pics red cherries by hand and will then transport them by truck to the wet mill he uses, which is 10 minutes from his farm. The de-pulping process is done by hand to save on water consumption from the near by stream. Erzi’s goal is higher quality coffee every year that will result in better income for his family and also strives for higher standards for environmental protection.
Fratello Coffee purchased the 13 bags Erzi had to sell; however, will only be offering a total of 5 bags (550 lbs) to our clients in Canada. This will be available by Christmas.
