Our trip to Honduras, May 2024

We were incredibly lucky at the start of the year to be offered the opportunity to visit one of our long term coffee partners, the Mierrisch family, to source our upcoming house coffee. Over the past few years we have had the privilege of sourcing and serving coffees from the Mierrisch family which has taken us to their farms in Nicaragua but this was our first time on Honduran soil. 

We set off from Bristol to London Heathrow, catching a flight to JFK (New York City) before taking our connecting flight to San Pedro Sula (Honduras). Erwin graciously met us an arrivals and swept us off in a jeep towards the farm in the region of Comayagua, which was around 2 hours from the airport. 

The first thing we noticed was the blistering heat. I checked the temperature on my phone, 38 degrees and 80% humidity. We knew we were nearing the farm when Erwin (Meirrisch) switched the truck into 4 wheel drive as we began to scale and as we bounced through the rocky terrain, climbing steeply upwards, we could start to feel the temperature ease. 

We arrived to Cerro Azul, the mother farm which hosts the QC lab. It was a small room that hosted a cupping table, a sample roaster and a log of all the coffees from this years harvest. Here, we met Erwin's Head of Quality Control - Don Marco, and the Farm Manager ........... . We then set up a cupping and tasted through some of this years fresh harvest (as well as some treats that we brought from home!). Fuelled by caffeine we jumped back in the truck and headed down to Cerro Azul.

As we drove through the hills we began to understand the true scale of coffee production - Cerro Azul sits on 96 hectares of land and hosts around 250,000 coffee trees, and in comparison to other producing countries like Brazil, this is a small farm... 

We arrived to the highest point of the farm where we sat and discussed the impact of climate change on their production, staffing issues in Honduras and some of the other products they grow on the farm. 

In the image above, behind Erwin you will see avocado trees that are used to give the soil additional nitrogen and also to be sold in local communities / to feed to workers during harvest. 

After meandering through the immaculate lines of coffee trees at Cerro Azul we headed off to visit the other two farm La Alita and Santa Lucia, where they grow some of their exotic varietals - Laurina, Geisha, Orange Bourbon, SL-28 and Pacamara. We stopped regularly to pull cherries from the trees and taste the fleshy sweet fruit that covers the seed. Here we talked about the farming protocols they have in place to protect the trees and ensure to ensure they are blooming at their fullest - we also discussed the different yields of different varietals and the cost of production.

The terroir of these two farms couldn't have been more different. Santa Lucia boasted large pine trees that provided deep shade for the Pacamara trees below it whilst La Alita was much more open with shade provided by avocado and plantain trees. Santa Lucia produced a Geisha in 2019, El Trianguilo, which went on to win the Honduran Cup of Excellence. 

It is a pleasure to be serving a delicious Washed Red Catuai, carefully grown, processed and harvested by the team at Fincas Mierrisch as our new house espresso. In stores now.