Farm info

Gonzalo Castillo is a third-generation coffee farmer living and working in the Santa Barbara region of Honduras. His family’s history in coffee began with his grandfather who established the family’s first coffe crops in the 1970s. The family farms would be passed to Gonzalo’s father, and eventually passed on again to Gonzalo and his siblings who today use the decades of wisdom collected by their father and grandfather to oversee coffee production, livestock management, and the cultivation of other crops like banana, allspice, and rambutans.

In 2018, guided by one of his brothers who had established a specialty coffee farm on the high part of the Santa Barbara mountain, Gonzalo purchased a three hectare property for specialty coffee production. He planted Pacas coffee across the property on the advice of his brother who recommended the variety as an optimal choice for the area and the farm’s 1550 meter elevation. Gonzalo also received training on post-harvest processing from his brother, and began focusing on producing exceptional microlots at his Finca La Tejana. His first harvest at the new property came in 2021, and in the following year he sold his first lot of specialty coffee to an international buyer. Since then, his desire is to contiuously improve his processes and maintain a healthy farm delivering consistently high quality coffee.

This lot of Pacas underwent Washed processing. Ripe coffee cherries were selectively harvested before being transported to a wet mill located in the neighboring town of Peña Blanca where delivered cherries are pulped every afternoon. The pulped coffee was dry fermented in concrete tanks for 20 hours before being washed three times to remove the fermented mucilage. The washed parchment coffee was then dried in a solar dryer for approximately 10 days, at which point the moisture content reaches 9.5–10.5%.