Honduras - Jorge Arturo Serrano Villanueva - Honey Process

Orange/Tangerine, Floral, Honey, Sweet Cherry, Rich, Creamy.

Sourced through a new relationship with the Honduran Coffee Alliance, this is the first time this coffee has been available in Canada.

Jorge is a third-generation farmer and grew up visiting his grandpa’s and parent’s coffee farms. He studied to be a veterinarian in Guatemala and still works part-time as a vet in the capital city of Tegucigalpa.

A friend of his asked him to help manage a farm for him and he started back into the world of producing coffee. After owning a smaller farm for several years, he bought Finca Tierra de Leyendas in 2011 with the dream of growing a large and successful coffee farm (Tierra de Leyendas translates to “Land of Legends”). At the time, half of the property had been stripped to be used for cattle grazing and planting sugar cane, so Jorge worked to replant trees throughout the farm and decided to plant coffee below half of the remaining forest and leave the other half as a protected reserve.

Jorge Serrano is currently working on renovating parts of the farm, and in 2022 he began offering the country house on the farm as an AirBnB with great success. Jorge and his family remain very involved with their church Gran Comisión, and he leads the non-profit branch 
('Fundación Gran Comisión') with a diverse range of projects to meet the significant need in the communities of Honduras near Gran Comisión churches.

He loves growing coffee because it provides so much employment. He started with 5 full-time employees and now has 30 full-time employees and 120 pickers during the harvest. He is proud to pay better than most in the area and see how the lives of his employees has improved. He told me ‘I know the homes of my employees and I have seen how they have improved over the years’. That is what makes it all worth it for him.
Update 2024 - Tierra de Leyendas has incorporated an ecological depulper for its wet processing this season, using only 10% of the water initially used, allowing for a substantial ecological improvement. This water is also recycled for washing the coffee. Experiments for new drying processes are also being incorporated, with honey and natural coffees, and all the coffee pulp is used to make Bocashi, which is the base for fertilizing the entire farm. 

Tierra de Leyendas is a large coffee farm with a great vision to bet on special and differentiated coffees, and its plans are to place these coffees and continue finding good relationships with buyers, where transparency prevails.