Mario Hervas Honey - Ecuador, Scenery | 200g

Honey, Mejorado, Lightest Roaster Influence - best for filter. Excellent pourover or freezer menu option

World Exclusive lot + FRESH CROP - this is the only honey Mario produced this season, entirely for us - using the protocol he has been developing for his Ecuador CoE entries.

Mario knows exactly what he wants to produce - his focus for the last 14 years has been on the selective breeding and phenotypic expression of the varieties he grows on his farm, first perfecting his Mejorado plants and now working on Rosado & Gesha. He produces exceptionally clean & sweet coffees that present the cultivar expression front and centre, and has no truck with higher intervention processing that might change how these coffees taste in the cup.

But Mario has been working on a honey process for the last few years - something that combines the clean expression of his washed coffees, but with a dry fermentation stage to add but a hint of the character you can achieve with processing like this. But Mario isn't a fan of exporting these coffees via sea - he thinks after 6 months, more of the "in-cherry" reposado flavours become more prominent, and that's not the sort of coffee he wants to produce (even though to us, we'd almost certainly find them delicious).

We became aware that Makicuna planned to air-freight a pallet of competition coffees (like Pepe Jijon's Finca Soledad) in August/September of this year - so we got in touch with Mario. We said - if we can get it fast, so it's still clean, can you make us a honey?

We were asking for something - asking Mario to take a risk, to make a custom lot, and he agreed. We're very, very firm believers that if you do something like that, you have a responsibility as a buyer to take that risk back on yourself. We let Mario set his own price, we asked for no samples, we had no specific volume request, we set no conditions on which we could reject the coffee - if it wasn't good, we'd have figured out an alternative use for it and eaten the loss.

When the 2 x 40kg boxes (the day lot Mario produced was about 50kg of green before the milling QC loss) arrived, we eagerly cracked open a vac-pac to sample roast. Safe to say this is one of the best coffee's we've ever had from Mario and it is an absolute stunner.