Tasting Notes: Spiced Pear, Milk Chocolate, Brown Sugar

Region:  La Paz, Honduras

Process: Washed 

Elevation: 1350 masl

Variety: Catuaí, Caturra, Pacas, Bourbon

Producer: Marcala Community

If you’ve been enjoying our more balanced coffee offerings, we have good news for you: The blessings keep pouring with our new Honduran coffee from the La Paz region! The flavor profile for this coffee is particularly conducive to the arrival of autumn, sporting notes of spices, fruit, and the sweetness of chocolate. However, our excitement for La Paz extends beyond any mere seasonal relevance. We believe that La Paz showcases the potential of washed coffees to produce complex yet familiar flavors, re-orienting our expectations of what a “traditional” coffee can taste like.

Honduras shares many of the same growing conditions as its Central American neighbors. The country’s varied elevation enables the production of coffees suited to different purposes, whether that be a crucial blend component or a remarkable specialty option that serves as a single origin offering. La Paz sits firmly in the latter category. It is named after the region it is sourced from, which finds itself situated in a mountainous area. Higher elevation yields beans with high nutrient-density, a quality that contributes significantly to a coffee’s complexity. 

Within this region sits a co-op between farmers that thrives on experimentation.This society of producers, dubbed the Cafe Organico Marcala (COMSA), sees its work as a striving towards the reduction of poverty and an increase in holistic sustainability. Undergirding this goal is an organics-oriented philosophy of the “5 Ms”: Material, Microorganisms, Minerals, Molecules, and Mind. The folks at COMSA see these five Ms as fundamental to cultivating healthy soil, which in turn produces high-quality coffee.