Origin: Los Alpes, Intibucá, Honduras

Farm: La Valeria (5 Hectares)

Producers: Jesus "Chungo" Galeas (pronounced hay-zeus)

Process: Natural

Varieties: Gesha

Altitude: 1700masl

Importer: Semilla with Sueños de Semilla

Roast: Light-Medium

Notes: Strawberry, Cream Egg, Floral, Cherry Chocolate Cake.

Transparency: 

• We paid Semilla $8.25 USD per pound of exportable green coffee + shipping & storage fees
  
• Farmgate paid to Jesus was $30,400 Lempira/carga of parchment. National average at the time was around $12,000 Lempira/carga of parchment
• FOB price was $7.75USD per pound of exportable green coffee.

About the Coffee

We had the absolute privilege to travel around Comayagua and surrounding areas with Jesus (pronounced hay-zeus) back in 2024, and let me tell you, this guy knows his coffee. Every farm we'd visit he'd taste every cherry, know every varietal, have advice on processing and growing, an absolute gem to his fellow producers.

Jesus has been planting more and more exotic lots in his two farms La Falda & La Valeria, and this is a super exciting natural offering of his exquisite Gesha lot. I love Honduran Natural coffee, their climate makes naturals strong and concentrated in flavour, and doing that to an already powerful gesha is diabolical. 

This Gesha, coming from both farms, is picked at peak ripeness daily, and then floated to remove defects. The coffee is then sealed in GrainPro bags for a primary low-oxygen fermentation for 48 hours. After this primary fermentation the cherries are spread across covered raised beds for up to 35 days, with constant movement and sorting throughout the process. After milling the green coffee is packaged in vacuum sealed bricks, sealing in all the amazing flavours Jesus created.

This coffee is huge, big fruity strawberry notes, beautiful elderflower florals, all enveloped in rich chocolate cream egg & boozy cherry chocolate cake. We've never had a Gesha that felt so "us" in profile. I think y'all are gonna love this one.

Read more about our 2024 trip below!

Sueños de Semilla, Comayagua, Honduras

In March of 2024 Kelly and I(Sonny) had the amazing opportunity to travel down to Honduras with Semilla & other roasters(who quickly became good pals!). This trip was an amazing experience, both of us had never visited a coffee producing region, and we were excited for it!

This trip exceeded all expectations. Not only was it an amazing, fun-filled adventure with trudging through wet farms & riding up steep mountains on the back of a Hilux, it was also one of hardship & emotions, learning first hand the difficulties of being a smallholder producer in an economy that is constantly trying to exploit you.

We traveled across the Montecillos Mountain range in Comayagua with Semilla, Jesus Galeas, life long producer and partner of Sueños de Semilla, as well as other amazing producers, such as Leodan, Addonnay, Don Clementino, Danilo, and Jeovanny (our trip wouldn't have been possible or half as fun without these folks.).

Everyday we drove and met with different groups of producers, listening to their stories, hearing about their processing, and having them show us their farms and homes. This is an important part of business for us and Semilla, having a direct connection with as many of the producers we work with as possible. 

This being the first year of Sueños de Semilla, majority of the producers we met were fully processing their coffee down the parchment for the first time. This is super important for producers as it allows them to capture the most profit for their product.

It's very common in Honduras (and many other producing countries) for producers to sell their cherry to intermediaries, or coyotes, losing much of the profit gained by processing the coffee down to parchment. This is especially bad when the price of coffee is low, and you are a producer in a remote location (we went to some REMOTE locations.), making it difficult to transport your own cherry to town.

With this process, most producers selling to Semilla this year received double the 2024 national farmgate price of 3500 lempiras per carga of parchment, and way more than that if they had sold as cherry, which is impossible for me to calculate, as it would depend on what the intermediary or coyote would have offered them day of.

We left Honduras with a strong desire to better our own business, to do better by the producers we buy from, and to be able to buy more from them. That same year we commited to 70~ bags of the 2024 harvest, then 100+ bags of 2025 harvest, and are now in the works for 2026 harvest where again, we'll be purchasing over 100+ bags of differentiated coffee from amazing producers.

Summary

Thank you if you made it this far down, all of this work would be for naught if it wasn't for the amazing folks like you who care about the coffee they buy, and how it is purchased, not just as a commodity of an "exotic" product, but as a extension of the persons who grew it. We consider ourselves lucky to be able to roast and serve such beautiful coffees.

There is obviously a lot I could go on about regarding our trip and experiences in Honduras, but I'll save that for our other releases. If you made it all the way down here, thank you. If you wish to read more about Semilla and their work in Honduras definitely check out their website, they're way better writers than me ;)

https://www.semilla.ca/projects/546cJP6GluJc1SKyotBciK

Happy Sippin'!