Costa Rica: The Trip That Brought Back Two Coffees

You can read about a coffee farm for years and still not know it.

We had been buying Costa Rican coffee for a long time before this trip. Good coffee. Coffee we were proud of. But there is a difference between a spec sheet and standing on the slope where the tree grew, and this year we finally went to close that gap.

Santa Bárbara de Heredia — Finca Rosa Blanca

Our first stop was Finca Rosa Blanca, a certified-organic farm tucked into the hills above Santa Bárbara de Heredia, northwest of San José. Shade grown, high altitude, and run with a seriousness about the land that you can feel before anyone explains it to you.

They walked us from the field through the beneficio — the wet mill, where the cherry is pulped, fermented and dried — and on to the roasting and packing house. Then we sat down and cupped.

By the time a bean is in a bag with our dove on the front, the most important decisions have already been made.

Finca Rosa Blanca, Heredia

That is the thing that stayed with me. So much of what you taste in the cup was settled long before the coffee reached a roaster — by someone standing in the mud at five in the morning, deciding which cherries are ripe enough to pick.

South into Tarrazú and the Dota Valley

Then we drove south, into Tarrazú, and climbed up into Dota. This is the region most Americans mean when they say “Costa Rican coffee” without knowing that is what they mean.

The mill there buys ripe cherry from smallholder families spread across the surrounding hillsides — farms sitting anywhere from 1,200 to 1,900 meters. You would think that spread would make the cup uneven. It does the opposite. There is an evenness to Dota coffee that I could never quite explain before, and after standing on those hillsides I understand it a little better: the whole valley is one long slope of the same weather, the same soil, and the same families doing the same careful thing, season after season.

That coffee is on the site now — washed, mechanically demucilaged, patio sun-dried. Semisweet chocolate, toasted almond, caramel, with a creamy weight to it and just enough acidity to keep it from going flat. It is the one I reach for on an ordinary Tuesday.

The other coffee we came home with

The second Costa Rican on our shelf comes from the other side of the country's Central Valley: Las Lajas Micromill, in Sabanilla de Alajuela, on the Poás side.

Las Lajas is Oscar and Francisca Chacón, third-generation growers who got tired of hauling their cherry down to the co-op for whatever the market felt like paying that week. In 2005 they bought their own depulper and started processing themselves — one of the first families in what became Costa Rica's micromill era.

Then a 2008 earthquake hit the Poás area in the middle of harvest and took out their power and their water. No power means no depulper, and cherry does not wait. Francisca built raised drying beds instead, a technique she drew from African coffee production, where air moves under the coffee as well as over it. The workaround turned out to be better than the thing it replaced, and those raised beds are now the reason Las Lajas honey coffees are the benchmark other Costa Rican mills get measured against.

Their Red Honey Catuaí is what we brought back. Red honey means a portion of the fruit is left on the seed through drying — timed to land between the delicacy of a yellow and the density of a black. Full and syrupy, lemongrass on top, red fruit through the middle, toasted hazelnut underneath. Fruit-forward without ever tipping into a fruit bomb, which is a harder line to walk than it sounds.

One quiet way to keep it going

Every trip like this ends the same way. You meet people, you drink their coffee, you shake hands on a hillside, and then you get on a plane and come home — and the question becomes whether the connection survives the trip.

For us it survives in bags. Every one of these coffees keeps a relationship alive with the people who grew and processed it, and every bag that leaves our roastery keeps supporting the mission work we do in the regions we buy from.

Thank you for choosing us. It is not a small thing.