Roy Hernández and Dariela Mancía, Finca El Mandarino (Dariela) and Finca Guayabina (Roy)

Dariela works a full-time job, raises a wonderful girl with her husband Roy, and still manages to cultivate fantastic specialty coffees for you!

In 2022, just weeks after Dariela gave birth to the couple's second daughter, Roy participated in a three-day workshop with Lucía Solís, a renowned expert in yeast and fermentation processes. The technical knowledge he gained proved crucial in further improving the quality of the batches the couple can now produce. After having their second baby, Dariela left her regular job, partly to care for the newborn, but also to dedicate more time to preparing the micro-batches.

Furthermore, with the income from their microlots, they were able to purchase a little more land—0.35 hectares—where they have planted Catucaí Amarelo 2L, a rare variety for Honduras, which Roy selected after careful consideration and discussion with Cafesmo's founder, Hidardo Hernández. They also plan to plant another 2 hectares in 2023.

Roy and Dariela have also increased their use of organic fertilizer (mainly pulp from their own coffee cherries) on all their plots and planted additional trees to achieve a better shade-to-sun ratio. In fact, their main goal for the medium-term future is to sell 70% of their harvest as SCA 86+ micro-lot coffees, and this requires perfect conditions, as well as excellent skills in all aspects of cultivation.

Their first micro-batches were sold to a US roaster in 2017, and it took another two years before they found a second roaster, this time in the UK (Notes Coffee in London). By 2022, however, Roy and Dariela had significantly expanded their customer base, which now also includes the Netherlands, Germany, Poland, France, and New Zealand.

Establishing and maintaining these relationships has greatly strengthened Roy and Dariela's self-confidence and solidified their reputation as reliable suppliers, capable of consistently delivering high-quality coffees.

Do they have any dreams for the future? Of course. To always prepare more and better coffees, of course. But they also want to start offering the "cascara" they make from their organic batches, the demand for which is growing in various parts of the world.

Another dream is to meet more roasters in person, not only in Honduras (where roasters are always welcome, of course!), but also in some of the countries where Roy and Dariela sell their coffees. The added value of seeing how a roaster works, how they actually roast the greens, and who sells the final product would be considerable, as it would allow them to better tailor their coffee preparations to the preferences of their end consumers.

And they also have personal and private dreams, of course: Roy and his family are very involved as volunteers and fundraisers in the renovation of their town's soccer field. We at Cafesmo suspect that, secretly, Roy would love for at least one of his young daughters to become the star player on that field someday . And Dariela works hard to put Honduran women and their coffee on the world map. It will be well deserved, because Dariela and the women in her community are hard workers who prepare exquisite coffees that are sometimes still forgotten or underestimated.

We bet that one day, maybe very soon, one of Roy and Dariela's coffees will triumph in the national Cup of Excellence auction!