Corner Booth / Honduras

About the Coffee

Los Laureles started in 2015 as a small family organization in Santa Bárbara, Honduras, and has since grown into a collective of around 30 producers. The group works under the guidance of Arbey Mejia, who has steered it toward smaller volumes of high-tier Fairtrade Organic coffee each harvest. Several of the producers are Cup of Excellence winners, which says something about the level of attention going into the lots that come out of this community.

Farmers in the group grow Parainema, Catuaí, Pacas, Geisha, and Bourbon in Santa Bárbara's soils, often alongside shade crops like banana and timber. Coffee pulp gets recycled through vermicompost systems rather than discarded, and water used in processing is recirculated or repurposed. Most producers dry their coffee on solar dryers, with final dry milling handled at Beneficio San Vicente, one of the more consistent and well-regarded milling facilities in Honduran specialty coffee.

The coffee itself is the Parainema variety, a hybrid developed by Honduras's national coffee institute, IHCAFE, to resist coffee leaf rust and nematodes while still producing quality that competes in the specialty market. It won the 2015 Cup of Excellence, which helped shift the perception that disease-resistant varieties couldn't place at that level. It's washed processed, which means the fruit is removed before drying, giving the cup a cleaner, more defined character.

About Rosso

Rosso has been roasting coffee in Calgary for 16 years, building their approach around direct relationships with producers and a sourcing philosophy focused on quality over volume. Rather than chasing trends, they've spent that time dialing in what careful sourcing and attentive roasting actually produce in the cup.