Good morning and welcome to today’s review of another coffee from my friends at H+S Coffee Roasters in Laramie, Wyoming. This is a special preparation honey process coffee from Honduras, so let’s dive right in and start slurping!
Purchase this coffee directlty from H+S for $17.50/12oz
Other reviews in this series: Colombia Finca El Paraiso | Nicaragua Finca Lo Prometido Natural
H+S COFFEE ROASTERS HONDURAS FRANCIS RODRIGUEZ CATRACHA HONEY SPECIAL PREP
It has been 5 years since my last reviews of H+S Coffee Roasters and they’ve only gotten better at what they do in that time. H+S Coffee Roasters was founded by Coulter Sunderman and Joshua Heien in the summer of 2014 in Laramie, Wyoming. Sunderman had gotten his start as a barista at another local Laramie roaster that leaned more traditional in its offerings. He worked his way into roasting and eventually becoming the roast master before heading out into the frontier on his own. H+S has remained strictly a roaster since then, with no cafe or open-to-the-public tasting room, although they do host cuppings and other events from time to time. They distribute coffee in shops and markets throughout Wyoming and even into Colorado in Fort Collins and the Boulder/Denver area, as well as happily shipping online anywhere you would like to order from. They have some really nice selections and their website is one of my favorite, with each coffee featuring tons of info about the farm and farmer, the coffee, flavors, brewing suggestions, etc. They even put information about how much of the price of each lb of coffee goes to each person along the distribution chain. It really is quite remarkable!
Continuing my recent experiment of trying to write these reviews up more like how I taste coffee (taste and take notes first, look the info up second so as not to bias my palate), my notes are below and I’ll give a lot more information about this coffee after that. This is a Honduran honey process coffee grown by Francis Rodriguez, that’s all I know right now! I’m using my standard pourover setup of a 1:16 ratio of 22g of coffee to 352g of Third Wave Water in a Trinity Origin dripper. I have it set up like a Kalita Wave, with three open holes and this brewer has a flat bottom like a Wave, too. I use Kalita 155 filters in it and I pulse pour my water through a Melodrip to minimize agitation in the coffee bed. This coffee got a 30 second bloom and the total brew time was 3:40 including the bloom.
The first aroma to hit my nose from the brewer was this great big caramel note. From the cup, there is a ton of dark caramel, hint of molasses and some roasty notes coming through, too. Taking a sip, this is a medium bodied coffee and that caramel is certainly strong in the flavor, too. I’m getting a citrus acidity here, which is hitting me someplace in between orange and pink grapefruit. It’s an interesting flavor note because I’m getting orange-like sweetness from it on the front end, but a couple seconds later it reminds me more of sweet pink grapefruit, but definitely the flesh and juice rather than the peel/pith. There is a hint of roastiness to this cup, mostly only coming through in the aftertaste, but it’s worth it for those glorious, sweet, big caramel notes. As the cup cools, this coffee remains super sweet and caramelly, and the citrus has settled into more of an orange-y territory for my palate. That’s a nice combination! I’m not being blown away by complexity from this cup, but it more than makes up for it in drinkability and sheer deliciousness!
This morning’s coffee is from Francis Rodriquez’s farm called El Matasano, which is just 2 acres located in Santa Elena in the La Paz departamento (like a state here in the USA), just north of the border with El Salvador. Until last year, Francis was selling his coffee to a local middleman, but he has since established a relationship with Catracha Coffee, and they’ve helped Francis take his crop to the next level. Catracha Coffee was founded in 2010 by Mayra Orellana-Powell, who was born and raised in Santa Elena, Honduras. Mayra founded Catracha Coffee from her home in the USA to have a positive impact on the community of Santa Elena, and in 2017 she and her husband moved back to Santa Elena to continue her efforts. Catracha strives to help farmers improve their growing and processing practices while putting more money in their pockets, a noble pursuit for the incredibly hard work and labor coffee farmers put into their craft. Caratcha Coffee works with 80+ farms now and helps with diversifying the community’s economy through it’s nonprofit organization.
This year was the first year Francis’s small 2-acre farm produced enough coffee for Catracha to separate his yield into its own microlot for sale. Francis uses his father’s (who has worked with Catracha for years) micro-mill to process his own coffee, and this coffee is a honey process. Honey process coffees are run through a depulping machine to rupture the cherries surrounding the two seeds (what we call coffee beans) inside and most of the skins, but instead of going into fermentation tanks to remove the rest of the sticky, sweet goop (mucilage) clinging to the seeds like a washed coffee, these sticky beans are laid out on raised beds to dry in the sun, like natural coffees. Honey process is a bit of a “best of both worlds” compromise, taking the sweetness and fruitiness found in natural process coffees but retaining less fermentation and yielding a “cleaner” cup like a washed coffee.
H+S said this coffee cupped well both as a very light roast and as a medium roast that brought out more sweetness, so they went with the later. Their tasting notes say to expect “Tangerine and citrus fruits, honeydew, mango, almond, marzipan, coconut, honey, very sweet, sessionable, velvety, lingering finish.” We certainly agreed on the sweetness front and with the tangerine and citrus fruits! As a pourover/filter coffee, this is a superb, easy drinker, with loads of sweetness and enough brightness to give some dimension to the cup without it being a coffee you have to sit and ponder too much.
Not surprisingly, this coffee makes for good espresso, too. I don’t want to share my parameters for shots with this one as I recently added a Quick Mill manual pressure profiling needle valve to my machine and am still getting used to it, so my shots were all over the place, but even weird ones in the 19g in, 50g out range were giving me loads of citrus notes like lemon candy, tangerine/orange and a bit of grapefruit.
lowelll
Lovely review. We will be sure to share the details with Francis.
Saludos desde Santa Elena