Finca El Pedrero, Honduras — Washed Espresso

Ernelio Ortiz owns and manages Finca El Pedrero, a 12-hectare farm in Honduras’s Montecillos region. Public producer profiles describe almost all of the property under coffee—about 56,000 trees—with smaller pockets of avocado. Ernelio grows primarily Catuaí and IHCAFE 90, but Cafe Imports has kept this washed Farm Select lot as a single-variety Catuaí offering under his name. Ernelio has said that caring for the farm’s environment has helped raise both production quality and the prices his coffee can command, making El Pedrero a useful example of how biodiversity, farm identity and careful lot separation can create more value at origin.

Montecillos is one of the six coffee regions formally defined by IHCAFE, spanning mountainous country around La Paz, where steep slopes and cool nights slow cherry maturation and favour dense, sweet seeds. Catuaí gives the lot another distinctly Honduran thread. The compact cross of Mundo Novo and Caturra was introduced to Honduras in 1979 and commercially released by IHCAFE in 1983; its stature supports dense planting and efficient harvesting, while high elevations can improve cup quality. Its trade-off is very high susceptibility to coffee leaf rust, so good farm management matters. At El Pedrero, a productive workhorse variety meets a mountain climate capable of drawing out real clarity and refinement.

For this lot, ripe Catuaí cherries are depulped and washed before drying, reducing fruit contact so that sweetness, acidity and regional character remain clear. Cafe Imports’ current spot-cupping notes describe cooked apricot, jammy orange, caramelised flavours and almond, with sparkling acidity and fruit-like sweetness. In the cup, that translates to apricot and orange-marmalade brightness over a caramelised-almond centre, with a clean, lively finish. It is a striking contrast with the anaerobic naturals previously released from El Pedrero: the same farm, but a more transparent expression shaped by washed processing.