I reviewed this Honduran coffee from Theodore’s Coffee Roasters back in Nov. 2017 and they sent me another bag, so it’s a great opportunity to take a second look at this coffee 6 months later. Happy Tuesday!
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La Fraternidad review from Nov. 2017
THEODORE’S COFFEE ROASTERS HONDURAS LA FRATERNIDAD
This morning’s coffee is sort of a “second look” at a coffee I reviewed back in November 2017. Theodore’s Coffee Roasters sent me a second bag and so I’m taking another look at it and I’ve been sure to not peek at my previous review until the end of this so I can compare and contrast what I tasted now compared to six months ago! This morning’s coffee is La Fraternidad, produced by Victor Ventura in Honduras. This is a Pacamara variety and the beans are huge! This coffee grows at 1830masl and Victor started growing coffee at age 10, helping out his father and brother. He took the business over at 28 and now, at 38, he is fully invested in developing the best quality coffees possible. This is actually the last year this Pacamara variety will be available from Victor as he is replanting the plantation with Bourbon and Geisha varieties.
Theodore’s gives us tasting notes of, “hint of caramel sweetness, fruity aromas and red apple, floral and sweet peach finish with a fine acidity” for this coffee. I’m using my standard pourover method of a 1:16 ratio of 28g of coffee to 450g of Third Wave Water in a notNeutral Gino with Kalita 185 filter. For grinding, I am using a Knock Aergrind.
The aroma from this coffee is sweet with a lot of apple in it for me. Taking a sip, this is just on the heavier side of medium in body for me. There is a lot of red and green apple notes in this coffee, for me. On the front end of the sip it’s sweet and caramelly with a sweet red apple juice character to the high notes. These quickly transition into a more tart green apple vibe in the middle of the sip. The finish itself is sweet, but there’s a bit of dryness on my palate in the aftertaste. The end of the sip retains that tartness that comes up in the middle, giving me more of an apricot descriptor than peach, here, although some sips were a little more tame and had more of a peach note in the later half, too.
Comparing my review from November, I called this coffee the “caramel apple of the coffee world” and this time around I’m getting more and brighter apple notes and less caramel. I also called out a slight bit of roastiness and some spices in the finish and I’m still getting hints of baking spices, but not really any roast. I’m also getting a bit less caramel vibe from this coffee compared to what it sounds like I tasted in Nov., so I wonder if Theodore’s changed the roasting parameters for this coffee at all? Taste and flavor is a notoriously fickle thing, too, especially in coffee, so everything could be exactly the same and I may simply be tasting things slightly differently myself. I mentioned a bit of citrus and even grapefruit in the November review and this time around it’s solidly “stonefruit,” predominantly apricot with a little bit of peach, for me.
This is as nice of a coffee as I remember. It’s bright and has a fair amount of tartness to the flavors and I really enjoy that. This is a refreshing, “pick-me-up” sort of coffee with clean, bright flavors that make me want to get up and go rather than tuck into bed and watch movies, if that makes any sense at all! A fantastic coffee and I hope I get a chance to taste some of Victor’s other varieties as they start coming up in the future.