MIXTAPE: Kyle Larson, Spring Rain
PDX Roaster Kyle Larson shares with us his bighearted, Northwesterly mix. We’ve been lucky to have him working at Stumptown for over 8 years, working as a retail and wholesale trainer before taking post behind the Probat for the last five years. He likes to plays indoor soccer and writes, he says, “cheesy sci-fi stories that only my hard drive gets to read.” He contributes to the music blog 67 Days of Music and tries to cook dinner for his family every night. He’s also maybe one of the nicest humans around.
JKJKJK
March 2013, Santa Barbara, Honduras
The efforts and work of Beneficio San Vicente remain fundamental to the ability of these smallholder farmers to participate in the global market and have direct relationships with roasters like Stumptown. While the mill, started by Don Fidel Paz Sabillon, has been around for some time exporting more volume oriented, conventional coffees, it has been the youthful, energized and entrepreneurial spirits of Benjamin, Arturo, and the rest of the new generation of the Paz family who have motivated the producers. They provided technical assistance for clean, sound processing techniques and encouraged planting of good quality varieties, such as 
Out of everything produced, we chose to purchase coffee from three top quality focused smallholder growers from two specific regions: Pompilio Ramos and David Muñoz from El Cielito, and Pedro Moreno from El Cedral. These producers sold all of their top notch lots exclusively to Stumptown. We spent a couple of days hiking around farms and seeing what is being planted and built up there. It was really positive. The views at the top overlooking Lake Yojoa are stunning. The cherry selection I observed after both days’ picking was nothing short of superb. One of our producers, Pompilio, in El Cielito community built solar dryer raised beds for this year’s harvest and added lovely ceramic tiles to his wet mill where he uses a motor operated depulper (powered by a motor the size of a small lawn mower or weed wacker). And David, from a neighboring farm, added to his raised bed infrastructure and purchased more land in order to plant additional coffee. After visits and tours of the sun drenched farms for a full day, we were thirsty and stopped in the local brew pub (D&D) for some really tasty homemade cerveza.
Next day at the cupping lab, the mill began to see lots of delivery from all kinds of farmers in the area, which is a cool energy to watch while cupping through some extremely delicious coffee. High prices in these parts go a long way, and it’s great to see that being reinvested in quality and good production. Positive results definitely showed in the early cupping we did at San Vicente. We are stoked to bring you these coffees this coming summer to showcase the best of what this special little region has to offer.