Specialty Coffee Wiki

IHCAFE

Properties3
descriptionHonduras's national coffee institute, founded in 1970 — the body that breeds the country's rust-resistant varieties, draws its six coffee regions, trains its farmers, and runs its quality lab.
tagsorganization, honduras, central-america, breeding, extension
aliasesInstituto Hondureño del Café, Honduran Coffee Institute, Coffee Institute of Honduras, organizations/ihcafe

9 min read

IHCAFE

IHCAFE is the Instituto Hondureño del Café — the national coffee institute of Honduras, founded in 1970.12 It is Honduras’s counterpart to Costa Rica’s ICAFE, Guatemala’s ANACAFÉ and El Salvador’s ISIC: a single body sitting above roughly 120,000 mostly smallholder farms, doing research, extension work, training and quality promotion for a crop that involves one household in ten.

The reason it matters to anyone outside Honduras is narrower and more concrete than “national institute.” IHCAFE is a plant breeder, and three of the varieties in this wiki carry its name on them. It is also the body that drew the six regional names printed on Honduran specialty bags, and the body whose 1974 imports stocked the country with two Central American dwarf Bourbon mutations.

Full nameInstituto Hondureño del Café
Founded197012
CountryHonduras
HeadquartersTegucigalpa, Francisco Morazán (single-sourced — see below)2
Stated mission”Promote the socioeconomic profitability of Honduran coffee producers”12
Varieties bredParainema, Lempira, IHCAFE 90345
Also introducedPacas and Villa Sarchi to Honduras, 1974

The varieties, and what they cost

Honduras is unusual among Central American origins in growing three rust-resistant lines bred at home. All three are IHCAFE’s, all three descend from the Timor Hybrid — the natural Arabica–Robusta cross that carries Coffee leaf rust resistance — and the World Coffee Research catalogue rates them very differently.

VarietyLineageRust resistanceYieldQuality potential at high altitude
ParainemaSelection of T5296 (Sarchimor family), released 2004Highly resistantVery highGood3
LempiraTimor Hybrid 832/1 × Caturra (Catimor family), with PROMECAFEIntermediate — but confirmed susceptible in HondurasVery highLow5
IHCAFE 90Timor Hybrid 832/1 × Caturra (Catimor family)SusceptibleHighVery low4

Read that table downward and you have the whole rust-resistance bargain in one institution’s output. IHCAFE 90 is a lowland workhorse: high yield, very high fertiliser appetite, bottom-of-the-scale cup, and — the part that stings — a variety bred against rust that scientific evaluation in Honduras found susceptible to rust anyway, plus highly susceptible to Ojo de Gallo, the fungal “rooster’s eye” leaf disease.4 Lempira is the same cross with the same ending, described by the catalogue as highly similar to Costa Rica 95 and recommended for acidic, aluminium-rich soils in the warmest zones.5 Both are documented in full on the Catimor page, which is blunt about what that family did to cup quality across Central America.

Parainema is the exception, and it is IHCAFE’s best piece of work. A selection of the Sarchimor line T5296 released in 2004, it is rated highly resistant to rust, resistant to some root-knot nematodes (Meloidogyne, though not Pratylenchus), tolerant of coffee berry disease, very high yielding — and rated Good for cup quality at high altitude, the same rating Caturra itself gets.3 That combination is rare enough that Honduras’s Cup of Excellence gave Parainema its own competition category in 2025, alongside “exotic” and “traditional” varieties. As the Sarchimor note records, Parainema’s competition record is the single strongest piece of cup evidence anyone has for a Timor Hybrid descendant.

IHCAFE also breeds jointly. The World Coffee Research catalogue records a six-institution Central American consortium — CIRAD–CATIE–ICAFE–IHCAFE–PROCAFE–ANACAFÉ — the French tropical agriculture institute plus the regional research centre in Turrialba plus four national coffee institutes. That group produced the F1 hybrids Centroamericano and Esperanza, documented on the CATIE page.

And before it bred anything, IHCAFE imported. It introduced Pacas and Villa Sarchi to Honduras in 1974 — the Salvadoran and Costa Rican dwarf Bourbon mutations, brought in together in a single year, as recorded on both variety pages.

What else it does

The most detailed account of IHCAFE’s own programmes available here is a published Q&A with the institute, which describes an organisation much wider than a breeding station.1

  • Six research and development centres across the country, working on production technology.
  • ESCAFE — the Escuela Superior del Café, IHCAFE’s own coffee school, training people across every role in the chain with an emphasis on producers and their families.
  • A coffee quality control laboratory, established in July 2008, holding ISO 17025 accreditation, staffed by Q graders and SCA-authorised trainers, operating as an SCA campus and supporting competitions including the Cup of Excellence.
  • The Bono Cafetalero — a producer support programme delivering fertiliser to more than 91,000 small and medium producers to cut their input costs.
  • Pest and disease programmes beyond rust: the coffee borer beetle and the coffee cricket.
  • Host of a Latin American breeding hub evaluating wild Ethiopian coffee accessions — the kind of germplasm work World Coffee Research coordinates and CATIE holds the collection for.

Two of these are worth pausing on. A national institute running an SCA campus with Q graders on staff is quality infrastructure most origins do not have, and it lines up exactly with the two decades of Cup of Excellence results Honduras has accumulated since 2004. And a fertiliser subsidy reaching 91,000 producers is a reminder of what this body actually is day to day: not a specialty tastemaker, but a farm-support agency for a commodity crop where most growers have a few hectares each.

The six regions

IHCAFE divides Honduras into six formal coffee regions — Copán, Opalaca, Montecillos, Comayagua, El Paraíso and Agalta — and those names, rather than departments, are what appear on specialty bags. The country’s altitude-based grading (SHG, HG, Central Standard) runs alongside them. Both systems, and the caveats on the exact metre thresholds, are set out on the Honduras page rather than repeated here.

Note what the region map leaves out: Santa Bárbara, the department behind much of Honduras’s competition record, is not one of the six official labels.

What IHCAFE is not

Like ICAFE next door, IHCAFE does not sell coffee and does not appear in auction results. There is no IHCAFE lot, no IHCAFE cupping score, no IHCAFE placement in Cup of Excellence or Best of Panama. When you see IHCAFE attached to a bag of coffee it is via a variety name, a region name or a grade — never as a producer or exporter.

To verify — legal status, headquarters, and the founding decree

IHCAFE’s own website (ihcafe.hn) could not be read here — it returned HTTP 403 to an automated request, the same result the Honduras page hit.6 So nothing on this page rests on IHCAFE’s own site.

  • The organisation’s LinkedIn profile describes IHCAFE both as “privately held” and as a private, non-profit institution of public character.2 Those two formulations do not sit comfortably together and could not be reconciled against a primary document. Compare ICAFE, which is formally an ente público no estatal — a non-state public entity — under Costa Rican law. IHCAFE may well occupy a similar hybrid position, but no Honduran statute or decree was read here, and none should be cited from this page.
  • Headquarters in Tegucigalpa, Francisco Morazán rests on that same LinkedIn profile alone.2
  • 1970 as the founding year is the best-supported institutional fact available: it appears on the LinkedIn profile2 and is independently consistent with the institute marking its 50th anniversary in 2020 in the published Q&A.1 The creating law or decree, however, was not located.

To verify — the programme figures

Every item in What else it does comes from a single published Q&A with IHCAFE,1 i.e. the institute describing itself through one trade publication. Nothing was cross-checked against an IHCAFE annual report or a government budget document. Treat the specific numbers as claims, not audited facts: the six R&D centres, the July 2008 lab founding, the ISO 17025 accreditation (cited there against the 2005 version of the standard, which has since been superseded by ISO/IEC 17025:2017 — the current status of the accreditation is unknown), the 91,000+ Bono Cafetalero beneficiaries, and the 98 wild Ethiopian accessions attributed to the breeding hub. The Q&A also dates to the 2020/21 harvest period; programme scale changes year to year.

To verify — how many cupping labs, and where

The Honduras page carries a claim from a green importer’s origin profile that IHCAFE runs a cupping lab in each of the six regions, offering free cupping to farmers. The Q&A read here describes six research and development centres and one accredited quality control laboratory.1 Those may be the same six sites described two ways, or they may be different things counted twice. The “free cupping in every region” claim is not corroborated by any source read here and should not be repeated as fact until IHCAFE’s own material confirms it.

Footnotes

  1. Producer Roaster Forum — Q&A with IHCAFE — confirmed via WebFetch ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7

  2. Instituto Hondureño del Café (IHCAFE) — LinkedIn company profile ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7

  3. World Coffee Research variety catalogue — Parainema — confirmed via WebFetch ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  4. World Coffee Research variety catalogue — IHCAFE 90 — confirmed via WebFetch ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  5. World Coffee Research variety catalogue — Lempira — confirmed via WebFetch ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  6. IHCAFE — official website ↩

Graph View

Backlinks