Good morning and welcome to today’s review of Theodore’s Coffee Roasters Parainema from Honduras. I had this same coffee from Theodore’s back in 2017, so I’m excited to check out the differences 4 years makes!
Theodore’s Coffee Roasters website
Purchase this coffee directly for $19/12oz (with free shipping)
Other reviews in this series: Buena Esperanza (Guatemala)
THEODORE’S COFFEE ROASTERS PARAINEMA
Theodore’s Coffee Roasters, founded by Darwin Pavon in 2013, has been featured on KC Coffee Geek a ton of times. Darwin is originally from Honduras and eventually settled in Owosso, Michigan, where he established Theodore’s Coffee Roasters. Darwin is also an agronomist and lead a team that worked with over 600 coffee farms from Mexico to Colombia, so he knows coffee, growing, production, and certainly roasting! Theodore’s is on my “buy anything from them and you’ll be happy” list and Darwin’s place there is well-earned.
This morning’s coffee is a coffee I also had back in 2017, so I’m excited to revisit my notes and compare them to see how this coffee has changed in 4 years. Parainema is a cultivar of coffee grown by Don Israel Ventura on his farm, Finca El Playon in Ocotopeque, Honduras. Darwin knows Don Ventura and his family personally and I imagine he has a lot of personal satisfaction and pride bringing their coffees to the American market each year. Parainema is a large bean, like Pacamaras, and was developed to resist “la roya” (leaf rust) and other coffee plant diseases. In 2017, Parainemas won the Cup of Excellence in both Honduras and Nicaragua, so it’s a bean with a lot of flavor potential, too. Finca El Playon sits at about 1680masl and Theodore’s calls this a light-medium roast. On the Roast Vision device, I got readings of 27, which places it in the “light” range for that device (using a scale of 0-35 with 35 being the lightest), and that converts to an Agtron of about 99.
I am using my standard pourover method for this coffee, which is a 1:16.5 ratio of 22g of coffee to 363g of Third Wave Water in a Trinity Origin dripper with Kalita 155 filter. The Trinity Origin is a flat-bottomed device and I have mine set for three holes open in the middle like a Kalita Wave. I use an Orphan Espresso Lido 3 grinder and pulse pour through a Melodrip to keep the coffee bed from getting agitated. This coffee took about 3:20 for the total brew, including a 30-second bloom.
My Tasting Notes
The aroma I’m getting from this cup is of bread crust and molasses or darkly caramelized sugars. Taking a sip, this is a medium to medium+ bodied coffee and sweetness is the first thing to cross my mind here. There is a nice caramel base to this coffee and it coats my palate like syrup. Coming in behind this caramel sweetness I’m getting fruits… some citrus and some apple notes, too. There is some red apple sweetness and crispness in the cup and the citrus is reminding me of blood orange. There’s a deep orange-like flavor with some savoriness, too. I’m getting a definite tea vibe from this coffee, with black tea notes throughout the sip. With that orange in the flavor it’s hard not to compare this to an Earl Grey, but in a totally different way from the very light tea-like coffees I’ve occasionally had from Ethiopia. This one is “darker” and has a lot more presence on my palate, but it’s like an Earl Grey with the intensity cranked to 11. As the cup cools that citrus acidity shifts a little and reads a bit more “tropical” to me, reminding me somewhat of pineapple. This coffee finishes pretty neutral but does leave a fairly dry sensation on my tongue, which always lends itself toward “tea-like” in my lexicon. There’s a very nice caramel note in the finish and aftertaste and that “feel” of tropical fruits lingers for a long time. About 30 seconds into the aftertaste I pick up both nuts and a lot of vanilla, which is curious because I don’t really find either in the sip itself. This is a nice suprise because the aftertaste is like a second, different coffee, so I feel like I’m getting two for one! Vanilla can be a tough flavor note for me to pick up on, but not here! It’s very apparent in this coffee. This is another really nice coffee from Theodore’s, sourced from an experienced farmer who obviously takes great care in growing and processing his Parainema coffee. YUM!
My 2017 Notes and What Theodore’s Has to Say About This Coffee
Theodore’s says this coffee has “tropical fruit, caramel, vanilla, peach, black tea” so it looks like my palate was just about spot-on minus the peach! Woot! They go on to say, “Holy chocolate and nut bomb, Batman! This coffee is loaded with white chocolate, milk chocolate, and cocoa notes paired with hazelnut, almonds and walnut. Velvety bodied, with a rounded orange acidity, it finishes with caramel and a sweet cacao finish. Accessible. Balanced. Inviting.” I will say I didn’t get much chocolate of any kind out of this coffee, but c’est la vie. Looking back over my 2017 review, I found this coffee to have a lot of chocolate in the flavor, with a more bitter cocoa finish. Also almonds and pecans and a bit of orange juice acidity. So, it doesn’t sound too far off four years later and a lot of those subtle differences could come from either the crop changing slightly and/or the roast parameters being slightly different. I enjoyed the 2017 version just as much, so this coffee is a definite winner no matter when you drink it!