Juan Contreras’s coffee is fermented in concrete fermentation tanks, for between 16–24 hours. His coffee is the dried on raised beds under shade. The coffee is then stored at Beneficio San Vicente, in parchment, inside Grainpro bags to protect the beans from the humidity (these are the green plastic-like bags you’ll sometimes see inside hessian sacks in our photos).

Alongside the Finca Genesis COE, this is also the first time we’ve shared a coffee featuring the Parainema varietal.

It’s a relatively unusual coffee varietal, found mostly on farms in Honduras and Costa Rica. Parainema is a hybrid created in the 1980s by IHCAFE, Honduras’ national coffee association.

Like most hybrids created by associations, its origins come in fighting pests and disease that threaten the local crops. In the case of Parainema, it brings restistance to leaf rust and nematodes, the latter being a particular problem with the tradition of planting coffee alongside banana plants.