Honduras Lempira Ebin Castillo

Every now and again you run into a coffee that punches above its weight. It's just better than it should be given its price or provenance. That's exactly what this coffee is: a knockout from Ebin Castillo, an up-and-comer whose Lempira farm has been gathering more and more attention.

There's nothing pretentious here. It's a classic cup. Washed. Drawn from a cultivar mix of Icatu and IHCAFE 90. But it's as sublime as a ska punk band—and you don't have to practice Santoria or use crystal balls to be reasonably certain that for fans of sweet, balanced, classics, it's a home run.

This cup eschews clear headliners for an evenly billed ensemble cast of killer flavor notes. There's milk chocolate; there's honey; there's apricot; there's lemon; there's graham cracker. There are, to be blunt, too many flavor notes to detail. And the cool thing isn't so much their individual contours, it's the way they assemble. Put all of these notes together, and they exceed the sum of their parts. It's the kind of cup that manages to be zingy and sweet and smooth and sharp and a million other flavor attributes at once. It's casual as refined. Ordinary as extraordinary.