Cupping Notes: El Liquidambar Microlot, Honduras
Tony Auger, our regional partnership manager, is a longtime coffee professional. Before joining us, he was the head roaster at Kaldi’s Coffee, where he won a number of awards, including third place at the U.S. Brewers Cup Championship finals and first place in a 2015 regional Brewer’s Cup competition. We have enormous respect Tony’s palette and opinions. And because we know so many people in the industry do as well, we thought we’d share his feedback on one our microlot selections from Honduras, El Liquidambar.
These beans were cultivated by brothers Walter and Sergio Romero, third-generation coffee producers in Coban, Honduras. (Click here to view a fact sheet.)
We’re so excited about these microlots, which are truly one-time experiences, that until Oct. 31, we’re offering free shipping on all Honduran microlots with the checkout code HNFREESHIPPING.
Overall, I have been incredibly impressed with our coffees coming out of Honduras. They are some of the most sugar- and fruit-forward Honduran coffees that I have ever tasted.
The Honduras El Liquidambar has really jumped out on the cupping table since the very first time I tasted it, scoring around 88.25 for me. When the coffee is roasted lighter, I got lots of lemon, tart stonefruit, and pure sugar cane notes that finished with a nice vanilla floral type complexity. With a little more development I tasted some rich red fruits, with a syrupy body that reminded me of warm caramel.
I love making pour overs of this coffee because I’ve noticed that you can really manipulate the flavor based on grind size and brew ratio. To me, this shows that this coffee has lots of complexity and can be used for multiple preparation methods.
— Tony Auger, regional partnership manager, Genuine Origin
We hope you’ll visit the Genuine Origin Coffee Project site to learn more about us and to order free samples of green coffee beans. You can also follow our journey and say hi on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.
