Specialty Coffee Wiki

Finca El Puente

Properties3
descriptionThe Honduran farm that won the 2016 Cup of Excellence at $120 a pound — run by Marysabel Caballero and Moisés Herrera in the highlands of La Paz, and the country's most consistently decorated name in specialty coffee.
tagsorigin, farm, honduras, la-paz, cup-of-excellence, geisha
aliasesEl Puente, Honduras Finca El Puente, Caballero Herrera farm

9 min read

Finca El Puente

Finca El Puente is a coffee farm in the La Paz highlands of Honduras, run by Marysabel Caballero and her husband Moisés Herrera. It is the single most decorated farm name in Honduran competition history: it won the 2016 Cup of Excellence outright and took second place in 2005, and its coffees sell through some of the best-known roasters in the world.123

The short version of why it matters: Honduras spent most of a century being treated as bulk coffee with no names attached. El Puente is one of the names that changed that.

OwnersMarysabel Caballero and Moisés Herrera34
WhereChinacla, La Paz on competition records;1 the family describes the operation as based in Marcala34
Altitude1,500–1,680 m5
Planted area180 ha of coffee at El Puente;5 300+ ha across the family’s several farms4
Main varietyCatuaí, with Geisha the competition and showcase variety56
Best result1st place, Cup of Excellence Honduras 2016 — 91.70 points, $120.50/lb1
MillOwn wet mill and a complete dry mill, so the farm controls everything up to export34

The competition record

This is the part that is documented by the competition organiser itself rather than by anyone selling the coffee, so it is the firmest ground on the page.

YearFarm enteredProducer as listedRankScorePrice
12016El PuenteMarysabel Caballero Garcia1st91.70120.50/lb** (lot 1a) and **120.10/lb (lot 1b)1
22005El PuenteMarysabel Caballero Garcia2nd92.03$5.25/lb2
32005Los CiprecesMarysabel Caballero Garcia12th88.522
42004Dulce NombreMarysabel Caballero Garcia2nd92.83$10.05/lb7
52004Dulce NombreEzri Moises Herrera Caballero3rd92.53$6.30/lb7
62004MogolaFabio Antonio Caballero4th91.94$6.20/lb7

Two things jump out of that table.

The 2016 win was a step change in money, not in cup score. El Puente’s 2005 lot actually scored higher than its 2016 winner (92.03 against 91.70) and sold for 5.25 a pound**. Eleven years later a slightly lower score fetched **120.50 — roughly twenty-three times as much. Nothing about the farm’s coffee changed by a factor of twenty-three. What changed was the number of roasters willing to chase a Honduran lot, which is the same lesson the Honduras and Premiumisation notes draw from later auctions.

The famous 2004 placings were not El Puente. Roaster write-ups routinely say the couple “won 2nd and 3rd place in the first Honduras Cup of Excellence in 2004.”4 The placings are real — but the official results list the farm as Dulce Nombre, not El Puente, and fourth place that year went to Fabio Antonio Caballero, Marysabel’s father, with a farm called Mogola.7 So 2004 is a family result across other farms, and El Puente’s own record starts in 2005. This wiki keeps the distinction because the farm names are what the auction actually sold.

The family behind it

Marysabel is a multi-generation coffee farmer, and the farm sits on top of a long family operation rather than being a standalone estate.

Her parents, Fabio Caballero and Sandra Isabel, bought farmland in 1975 from Marysabel’s grandfather, Arsaces García; the family traces its coffee back to her great-grandfather Don Felipe García around 1907.3 Marysabel and Moisés married in 1996.3 Moisés came into coffee sideways — he had been an accountant running a Guatemalan coffee company’s Honduran operations before the two of them started farming together.6

When Fabio retired he sold most of his farms and his share of the family wet mill to Marysabel and Moisés.4 That mill was later modernised and, around 2020, a full dry mill was added — meaning the farm handles its own coffee from the tree all the way to the sealed export bag, with no third-party miller in between.345 For a producer selling named micro-lots, that control is the whole game: it is what lets a specific day’s picking stay a specific lot instead of disappearing into someone else’s bulk run.

Growing and processing

El Puente sits between roughly 1,500 and 1,680 metres.5 In Honduran export grading that is comfortably SHG — Strictly High Grown, the top altitude band described on the Honduras page.

Catuaí is the backbone of the planting, and it is what most of the farm’s commercial volume is.56 Alongside it the farm grows a deliberately wide collection: Geisha, Java, Pacamara, red and yellow Bourbon, Pacas, SL-28 and Batian.5 SL-28 and Batian are Kenyan material, which is unusual in Central America — the Honduras note records a Honduran SL-28 placing second in the 2024 national auction, so this is a country experimenting more than its reputation suggests.

Honduras is overwhelmingly a washed origin, and El Puente does plenty of washed coffee. But it has spent recent years working through naturals and anaerobic ferments as well.5 The natural drying protocol is specific: cherries picked and sorted, then dried on raised beds for about 30 days in an area where shade and sun can be adjusted to hold the temperature steady, and finally sealed into GrainPro barrier bags once moisture drops to 10–11%.5 Thirty days is slow — a rushed natural can be done in half that — and slow drying is generally how you avoid the ferment tipping from fruit into vinegar.

Who buys it

El Puente is a farm whose customer list reads like a roll call of specialty coffee: Stumptown Coffee Roasters, Counter Culture Coffee and Tim Wendelboe have all sold it under the farm’s name, and 88 Graines imports it as green coffee.4568 Stumptown’s own site lists a Honduras El Puente among its core single origins, which is how the farm already appears elsewhere on this wiki.

Selling under the farm’s own name, year after year, to buyers in three countries is the practical definition of what Cup of Excellence was built to create — a producer who no longer needs the auction because the relationships outlived it.

To verify — Chinacla or Marcala?

The sources place the farm in two different municipalities of the same department. Alliance for Coffee Excellence’s official 2016 results list the region as “Chinacla, La Paz.”1 The farm’s own website describes the operation as based in the municipality of Marcala, spanning four different growing areas,3 and both Tim Wendelboe and the importer 88 Graines say “near the town Marcala” / “Marcala, La Paz.”45 Marcala and Chinacla are neighbouring municipalities in La Paz, and “Marcala” is also used loosely as a regional coffee name, so these are probably compatible — the competition lot came from a plot in Chinacla within a Marcala-based operation. That reconciliation is an inference and has not been confirmed by any source read here. The department, La Paz, is agreed by everyone.

To verify — which variety won in 2016

Tim Wendelboe states the 2016 Cup of Excellence win was “with their Geisha coffee.”4 The ACE results table for Honduras 2016 does not list a variety for either winning lot in the version read here — only the farm, producer, region, score and price.1 The win itself, the 91.70 score and the $120.50/lb price are official and solid; the Geisha attribution rests on one roaster’s account and should be checked against the full ACE lot sheet before being repeated as fact.

To verify — how big the farm is, and how many varieties

The figures do not line up cleanly:

  • 88 Graines reports 180 hectares of planted coffee at Finca El Puente and gives a variety split of roughly Catuai 80% / Geisha 20% plus the others listed above.5
  • Tim Wendelboe says the couple “own and manage over 300 hectares of land divided into several small farms.”4
  • The farm’s own site says the operation spans four regions and grows 56 coffee varieties.3

180 ha for El Puente inside a 300+ ha family holding is a plausible reading, but no source states that relationship. Fifty-six varieties versus the eight-or-so named by the importer is a much bigger gap — most likely a full collection plot versus commercially planted area, but that too is inference.

To verify — how many generations, and the 1907 date

Tim Wendelboe describes Marysabel as a “3rd generation coffee farmer.”4 The farm’s own site traces the family to great-grandfather Don Felipe García in 1907, which would make her the fourth generation.3 The 1975 land purchase from grandfather Arsaces García and the 1996 marriage come from the farm’s site alone and have not been checked against any independent record.3

To verify — the buyer relationships and dated lots

Two specific claims here come from a single seller’s own page each, and neither was independently confirmed:

  • Stumptown states Finca El Puente “produced the first lot of coffee we bought from them in 2004.”8
  • Tim Wendelboe’s Finca el Puente Geisha listing gives a harvest window of January–February 2025 for that lot.9

Both are the kind of thing the seller would know best, so they are likely accurate — but a roaster’s marketing page is not an independent record, and neither date is corroborated.

Footnotes

  1. Alliance for Coffee Excellence — Cup of Excellence Honduras 2016 results and auction — confirmed via WebFetch ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6

  2. Alliance for Coffee Excellence — Cup of Excellence Honduras 2005 results and auction — confirmed via WebFetch ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  3. Finca El Puente Coffee — Our Story (official site) — confirmed via WebFetch ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7 ↩8 ↩9 ↩10 ↩11

  4. Finca el Puente — Tim Wendelboe — confirmed via WebFetch ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7 ↩8 ↩9 ↩10 ↩11 ↩12

  5. Finca El Puente Coffee Farm — 88 Graines, green coffee importer — confirmed via WebFetch ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7 ↩8 ↩9 ↩10 ↩11 ↩12

  6. Finca El Puente — Counter Culture Coffee ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  7. Alliance for Coffee Excellence — Cup of Excellence Honduras 2004 results and auction — confirmed via WebFetch ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  8. Honduras Finca El Puente: A Bridge of Discovery — Stumptown Coffee Roasters ↩ ↩2

  9. Finca el Puente Geisha — Tim Wendelboe ↩

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