The road to San Isidro runs about fifteen minutes out of Ruinas de Copán, through country that goes dry and dusty most of the year. The farm has been in Katia Duke's family for generations, and for most of that time it worked the way farms around there worked: grow the cherry, sell the parchment to whichever local intermediary came around, then do the whole thing again next season. Katia spent her childhood on that land fully expecting to carry it forward the same way.

Then 2012 happened, and la roya, the leaf rust epidemic, moved through Honduras and destroyed most of the country's crop. It was the kind of year that ends farms, and it made Katia stop and ask whether the old way was worth carrying forward at all. She went to Zamorano to study agronomy, then went further than that and got certified as a barista and a roaster so she'd understand the entire chain rather than just the first link in it. She opened a coffee shop where she roasted her family's coffee herself, and after a long stretch of conversations with her father, she was finally given plots to farm however she saw fit.

Being handed land, it turned out, was not the same as being handed respect. On her first day as a producer, two people showed up to work with her, and both of them were women, because everyone else refused to work for one. The team at San Isidro today is one Katia built from nothing, on the plain principle that everybody there is owed the same regard, and she's carried that same energy into Copán itself by helping build a school and start a nutritional program in the community around her.

The coffee in this bag is Catuai and Catimor grown at 1,300 meters, processed anaerobic red honey. Ripe cherry gets partially depulped and sealed into oxygen-free tanks for roughly 72 hours, a fermentation that hands you clarity or chaos depending on how closely it's watched. From there the coffee moves to raised beds still heavy with mucilage and dries slowly, which gives all that sugar time to settle into the bean rather than simply drying down on top of it.

When we cupped it, we marked sweetness at the very top of the scale, and what came up was brûléed grapefruit, malt, and churro, with cinnamon toast and graham cracker sitting just behind them. Buttery and silky, light acidity, about as clean as anything that's crossed our table this year.

Producer: Katia Duke, San Isidro
Region: Copán, Honduras
Altitude: 1,300 MASL
Variety: Catuai, Catimor
Processing Method: Anaerobic Red Honey