Carlos Madrid
Carlos Sagastume Madrid is the fourth generation of one of the more decorated coffee-growing families on Santa Bárbara Mountain - basically ground zero for Honduran speciality production.
His cousin Jennifer Iveth Madrid Chávez won the Parainema category at the 2025 Honduras Cup of Excellence with a washed Parainema, and other members of the Madrid family have been appearing in Cup of Excellence results for nearly two decades.
This is a family that’s leant hard into speciality coffee, getting better at it with every generation.
This washed Parainema is a great expression of Central American clarity and sweetness. It’s high-quality Honduras typified. Not everything needs to be fucked with.
Carlos and El Ziba
Carlos has been involved in coffee for pretty much his whole life. He inherited El Ziba from his mother, who had been given the land from Carlos’s grandfather. This seven-hectare plot, sitting around 1,500m up Santa Bárbara Mountain, represents both a legacy and fruitful opportunity for future generations of the Madrid family. It’s not a massive farm, but big enough to seriously bang in the right hands.
Carlos is by no means an old hand, and was still quite young when he took over the farm, so the wider Madrid family remained heavily involved. He credits his grandfather and uncles with helping him manage the farm, teaching him about Pacas and Parainema, speciality processing, and access to the speciality market with San Vicente. He inherited the land, and the support to make the best of it.
Today Carlos is part of the fourth generation of Madrids choosing to stay on the mountain and continue the family business. Alongside coffee, El Ziba produces plantain, avocado, tangerine, soursop and nance, with Carlos planning to plant more fruit trees, introduce new coffee varieties and continue improving the farm's wet mill.
Processing
- Cherries harvested at peak ripeness.
- Then depulped and dry fermented in a concrete tank for 18hours.
- Next, the parchment is washed with a lot of water to separate the mucilage completely.
- The fully washed parchment is put on raised beds for pre-drying for 8 hours; during the pre-drying, the parchment is sorted by hand to remove defective beans.
- Finally, it's put inside the parabolic solar dryer for around 14 days until adequate moisture.
Parainema
This is the type of variety we’re always banging on about. A locally selected hybrid with some Timorese genetics in the mix.
It’s a Sarchimor variety, selected in Honduras from breeding material developed in Brazil by crossing Villa Sarchi with the rust-resistant Timor Hybrid. Originally it was developed for primarily practical reasons - leaf rust resistance and yield - but like a lot of these Timor hybrids, it quickly became apparent that it had plenty to offer speciality coffee too.
This is a coffee that just loves Santa Bárbara, and its resilience and brilliance mean the local producers who know how to get the best out of it love it right back.
San Luis Planes, Santa Barbara
San Luis Planes is a small coffee-growing village high on Santa Bárbara Mountain, overlooking Lake Yojoa in western Honduras. Farms here tend to be fairly small, with El Ziba’s seven hectares fairly representative of a well-established family farm in the area. Within the Santa Bárbara region, a few small communities have gained global recognition for the quality of their coffee. San Luis Planes is one of them.
A lot of that reputation is tied to Beneficio San Vicente, a mill and exporter based at the foot of the mountain in Peña Blanca. Run by the Paz family, San Vicente has worked with producers around Santa Bárbara for decades, and has been a key catalyst in the area’s speciality boom since around 2005. Benjamin and Arturo Paz have become particularly associated with the region’s speciality production, helping farmers identify and improve their best coffees, and connecting them with speciality buyers around the world. Today the Santa Bárbara name is recognised by speciality roasters globally, at a level few Central American coffee regions have managed to achieve.
The Madrid family have been part of that story for generations. Carlos and his relatives have worked with San Vicente and Benjamin Paz, and today San Luis Planes is home to a pretty ridiculous concentration of accomplished producers. Carlos's cousin Jennifer Iveth Madrid Chávez won the Parainema category of the 2025 Honduras Cup of Excellence, while other members of the family have been appearing in the competition for nearly two decades.
Honduran Coffee - Context
Honduras’s story is definitely worth its own piece. In one breath it’s archetypal Central America, but in another it’s totally contrasting. This is probably the country most heavily associated with the term ‘banana republic’ - a reference to the huge influence American fruit companies once held over its land, economy and politics. Its relationship with, and usefulness to, the United States has somewhat defined it politically over the past century. At times this has isolated Honduras from its neighbours, creating an economic and political dependency that its ally to the north would not always repay.
Coffee here tells a different story.
In contrast to much of the region, its growth represented a shift in agricultural production towards Honduran hands. While neighbouring countries developed coffee industries around powerful landowners and large estates, Honduras’s best agricultural land on the Caribbean coast had already been swallowed up by the fruit industry. The growth of smallholder coffee production over the latter half of the twentieth century therefore presented a real opportunity for rural Honduran communities.
Honduras today has its problems. Political instability, inequality and gang violence persist, while rural communities face increasing climate instability and the continued loss of young workers seeking better-paid opportunities overseas. These pressures compound one another, and Honduras remains one of the poorest and most unequal countries in Latin America.
This is a country with immense potential for speciality coffee. It’s also a country where the extra dollars paid for a premium product can create development opportunities fairly quickly. It may not quite sit with Colombia in terms of price and demand, but its producers and terroir are producing some serious show stoppers.
