THE COFFEESHOP HONDURAS / Miguel Armand Sagastume Pacas

This year will be a bumper year for Pakas coffee in Honduras.

I had a premonition, and roasting this latest batch of coffee beans has confirmed my judgment.

This is the third batch of Honduran Pakas coffee since the beginning of 2025. Each batch has a tropical stone fruit sweetness and a slightly tart flavor reminiscent of Japanese cuisine.

They are all very easy to drink, with a rich and full-bodied flavor that leaves a lasting impression. These coffees are just what I like.

By the way, all our suppliers are SHU HA RI, and our exporter is San Vicente.

Angel, a representative from San Vicente, visited Japan during SCAJ, and I had the privilege of greeting him.

I was happy to tell Angel in person that I "definitely will go" to San Vicente—a country I admire very much.

The coffee this year is of exceptional quality; if possible, I definitely want to visit next year.

Miguel, one of the growers of this coffee, helped out on his father's coffee farm from a young age, learning how to plant coffee, fertilize it, and pick coffee cherries during the harvest season.

When he was 15, his father gave him a piece of land to grow coffee.

He created an organic nursery that did not use any chemicals, and because he couldn't afford to hire workers, he did all the planting himself.

In 1980, his father rented two hectares of land to Miguel, who began growing more coffee. However, due to persistently low coffee prices at the time, he closed the farm almost every year without making a profit.

In 2014, he bought the farm now located in a promising area and planted Pacas coffee the following year. In 2019, he prepared his first micro-lot of specialty coffee and sent it to a processing plant in Saint-Vicente, where it was sold to a specialty coffee buyer.

He said that since then, he has been fortunate to be able to sell specialty coffee.

The farm is far from his home, and some parts of the journey require walking, which makes transporting crops and coffee extremely difficult.

He stated that the medium-term goal is to build a better washing and processing plant on the farm and improve the coffee processing procedures.

Miguel has been working with Suhari for three years. When I visited him again this year, we talked, and he told me that he had actually planned to stop coffee production the year he started working with Suhari.

However, Suhari appreciated his coffee and bought some, which led him to decide to continue producing coffee.

During processing, the coffee cherries are carefully picked and then transported to his simple washed processing plant. Every afternoon, the pulp is removed, and then parchment paper is placed in fermentation tanks for 20 to 22 hours of dry fermentation.

Afterward, rinse the parchment with plenty of water about four times.

The coffee beans are then spread out on African-style drying beds to dry for about 12 days.

During the drying process, the parchment paper is manually sorted to remove any defective beans.