Brewing Suggestions and Flavor Description for Honduras Double Flower Estate Red COE Catuai Variety Coffee

Honduras lies in the north of Central America, bordered by the Caribbean Sea to the north and by the Gulf of Fonseca on the Pacific side to the south. To the east and south it shares borders with Nicaragua and El Salvador, and to the west it adjoins Guatemala. The country is made up mostly of mountains and plateaus, and with its tropical climate, mild temperatures, and abundant rainfall, it offers an ideal setting for growing coffee.

Neiry Suaba Oliana Aguilar inherited the plantation from her father and family. To keep the coffee's quality on track, they send their crop to the ARUCO ENTERPRISE association every year for cupping and quality control. Neiry named the plantation Las Gemelas — "The Twins" — to commemorate the birth of her twin daughters.

Historically, the Neiry family grew Yellow Catuai. This year Neiry shifted her approach, transplanting the existing Yellow Catuai and putting in a new batch of Red Catuai in its place.

At the same time, she broke away from the family's traditional washed method and experimented with natural processing, taking that route into competition. Her two experimental competition batches were processed differently: one was fermented for 72 hours before drying, the other for 90 hours. The award-winning beans come from the 72-hour extended-fermentation batch.

Variety (Red Catuai)

Red Catuai is a natural variant of the Arabica Bourbon variety, discovered in Brazil in 1937. Compared with other coffee varieties, Red Catuai produces more compact fruit that is harder to harvest. It resists disease well, making it suitable for high-altitude cultivation, and the coffee it yields has a delicate, clean acidity.

Red Catuai shows medium acidity with a smooth, mellow mouthfeel. It offers excellent body and sweetness, with a gentle character that lets it blend harmoniously with most coffees without significantly altering their flavor profiles.

FrontStreet Coffee's Recommended Brewing Method

V60 Dripper Brewing

Water Temperature: 90–92°C

Coffee Dose: 15g

Coffee-to-Water Ratio: 1:15

Grind Size: Medium-fine, similar to granulated sugar (BG-5R grind size, which achieves 60% pass-through through a China standard #20 sieve)

Brewing Technique: Poured in stages. Begin with 30g of water for a 30-second bloom. Using a small stream, pour in a circular motion to 125g, then pause. When the water level drops and is about to expose the coffee bed, continue pouring to 227g and stop. Remove the dripper when the water level drops again and is about to expose the coffee bed. (Timing starts from the beginning of the bloom.) Total extraction time: 1'54".

Honduras Coffee

Washed Processing Method

FrontStreet Coffee Recommendation

If you simply want a first taste of the Brazilian profile, FrontStreet's Half-Washed Cerrado is a textbook Brazilian single-origin. Cerrado is a well-known local region celebrated for high-quality beans, and FrontStreet's lot is the Red Bourbon variety common across South America; at a medium roast it opens with the rich aromas of creamy peanut, toasted bread, caramel, and hazelnut, with a rounded body that is not acidic and carries a faint bitter note. It works as a pour-over, but is equally at home in a moka pot, as an espresso SOE, in a siphon, or in a French press.

FrontStreet also offers a Brazilian single-origin from the Queen Estate, grown in Mogiana near South Minas. The area's fertile red volcanic soil lets the coffee cherries take in plenty of nutrients and develop a full aroma. Some farms there hold to traditional methods while others have adopted modern, standardized management, and the local quality has improved markedly as a result. The Queen Estate lot is the rare Yellow Bourbon, a natural mutation of Red Bourbon with a cleaner fruit character; brewed as a pour-over, in a moka pot, or on a home espresso machine, FrontStreet's Queen Estate reveals the sugarcane-like sweetness found in no other region, alongside fruit and chocolate notes.

Brazil's low-acid, balanced cup and approachable price have also made it a mainstay of many espresso blends. FrontStreet's Classic Blend with its rich crema, the nutty Signature Blend, the balanced Black Cocoa — a favorite of many baristas — and FrontStreet Coffee's Commercial Blend made especially for cafés all contain Brazilian beans. The Brazilian component brings not only chocolate and cream aromas but also a soft balance of sour, sweet, and bitter, whose even temperament helps keep extraction stable.