Marcala is a municipality in the Honduran department of La Paz, located in the southwest of the country. It is home to the COMSA Cooperative where we source a variety of coffees of great quality. My goal in Marcala was to source various microlots as part of our single origin offerings for 2013. Look for these coffees to be available for late spring or early summer!
I
arrived in Tegucigalpa on a Saturday afternoon.
If you haven’t flown into the airport here before let me tell you that
it is quite an experience unto itself. I
am told this is the second shortest runway in the world due to its location in
the mountains. Landing here is difficult
and my plane definitely bounced off the runway practically knocking me out of
my seat. The first day here was spent
meeting the other 9 roasters and buyers who were accompanying me on this
trip. We had a really great dinner and
some drinks and retired early to make the 3 hour trip by bus to Marcala.
Day two
was also pretty low key. We drove to
Marcala, set up shop at our new hotel and then the people of COMSA arranged for
a celebration of which included dinner, presenting us all with cupping aprons
and a live performance by Guillermo Anderson.
I had not heard of him before but apparently he is a world renowned
musician. I really enjoyed it
actually. He plays a fusion of
traditional Honduran folk, Caribbean and blues and his songs are very centric
to Honduran life. It really struck me as
pretty incredible that not only COMSA had arranged this for us but that Mr.
Anderson was overwhelmingly happy to perform for some coffee roasters and
farmers.
The
third day was when we got down to business.
Over the next 3 days we would cup coffee from 109 farms, visit 5 farms,
the COMSA wet and dry mills and have quite a lot of great meals and
conversations with producers. The
members of COMSA are hardworking, savvy and incredibly proud people. The quality of the coffee here is great and we
were able to find a great many truly excellent coffees even in light of the coffee
rust problems that are beginning to greatly affect many farms in Central
America. Some farms here have entirely
succumbed to devastation from coffee rust or Roja as they call it in Central
America. COMSA estimates that this will
affect 30-40% of all production. Despite
this, most of the producers seemed to have a very positive attitude and they
believe that in the long run this epidemic will cause them to modernize and
find new solutions to these problems and will allow them to stand on stronger legs
in the future.
I am
thankful for the experiences I had and the people I met in Marcala. I fully expect coffee quality to increase
each year despite the decline in production.
The producers here are incredibly resilient and I am confident that they
will indeed triumph over adversity and it inspires me to do what I can for my
part to share the quality and hard work that is the literal fruit of their
labor.
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