Finca Pashapa French Roast

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Read Kim Elena's trip report from her visit to Finca Pashapa in March 2009 in our Origins section.

We've had a secret relationship over the past few years. Tantalized? Well, here's the secret: for the past three years, we've been sourcing coffee from a farm in Honduras called Finca Pashapa, run by the dynamic Roberto Salazar. Here's the story:

Dark roasted coffees, in particular the famous French Roast, are an important part of any coffee program. Dark roasts can provide a certain idiosyncratic smoky depth to blends, and some coffee drinkers prefer drinking bittersweet dark roasts as their daily coffee. Creating a great French Roast is a challenge: it takes skill and real craftsmanship to bring the roast to mahogany darkness without scorching, and keep the natural sweetness of the coffee intact. One often overlooked secret to creating a great French roast, however, is to start with superb green coffee. Of particular importance is the coffee's hardness: dense, strong coffee withstands the trying dark-roast process much better than more delicate coffees, and so the best French Roasts come from high altitude, healthy, vigorous farms.

In 2003, while visiting Honduras for that year's coffee tasting contest, I tasted such a coffee. Solid as a rock, this coffee was built to roast. It had a dense body, sweet acidity, and pure coffee flavor. Later, I met the farmer, Mr. Roberto Salazar from Ocotepeque, and made plans to visit his farm. The next day we started on the long drive to Ocotepeque, on the northwest border of Honduras, near Guatemala. Like many border areas in Latin America, Ocotepeque can be a little dicey — immigrants and contraband cross this border, including coffee smuggled from Honduras to sell as "Guatemalan" coffee, since Guatemala has a better name in the coffee industry. Somewhere along the way, we acquired a military escort!

Finally, we reached Finca Pashapa, which was like arriving in a forest paradise. I'l never forget walking into the farm—it felt almost like entering a giant, green, airy room. The towering shade trees formed a perfect canopy, covering the carpet of coffee trees below. Birds darted between the canopy and the trees, and soared around the trunks of the trees holding up the "ceiling," where green leaves let a bit of dappled sunlight through. The farm was pristine and beautiful. As Roberto continued his tour around his farm, he explained his commitment to organic agriculture, and showed us his earthworm compost station, which remains the most impressive I have ever seen at a coffee farm. The high altitude of the farm (more than 4,000 feet above sea level), dense shade, and conscientious farm management are what create a phenomenal "hard bean" coffee, perfect for rigorous roasting.

That year, we bought our first lot from Finca Pashapa. It has been our pleasure and honor to roast Mr. Salazar's coffee every year since. In 2005, I served alongside Roberto as a juror in the Honduras Cup of Excellence of that year. He is a accomplished cupper as well as farm manager, and he also runs a coffee dry mill where other farmers' coffees are milled for export. Roberto is heir to a rich coffee tradition: his grandparents founded Finca Pashapa 42 years ago, and produced the first washed coffee in the region! It is a stellar coffee and an interesting story, way too good to be hidden behind the anonymity of simply "French Roast."

So this year, for the first time, we will be selling the first farm-specific French Roast we have ever heard of. We're extremely proud of this coffee—it is sweet and complex, never ashy or hollow the way lesser French Roasts can be. Dark roasting lends a particular bittersweet character to the coffee, bringing to mind a 70 percent dark chocolate. Thanks to Mr. Salazar and our crack roasting staff, I am confident this is the most delicious French Roast on the planet, INCLUDING France.

- Peter

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