COSTA RICA - Aquiares Estate

The Flavour Profile

This coffee is carefully roasted to reveal its bright plum, marzipan, and sweet honey flavours. With a medium body, it suits all brewing methods and is perfect for enjoying throughout the day.

The Little Details

This coffee comes from the Aquiares Estate farm in Aquiares town in the region of Turrialba in Costa Rica. It's grown1200 to 1400 metres above sea level and this specific lot underwent the African Washed process. This is a 100% Esperanza variety coffee beans. 

About the Process

This lot is 100% ‘Esperanza’ variety – a hybrid of Caturra and the Ethiopia 531 variety, developed by variousCentral American coffee research institutes. Esperanza marries high cup quality with high resistance to disease – particularly the ojo de gallo fungus. Aquiares has found the variety very well-suited to the farm’s high elevation (grown above 1,200 meters in most cases) and as consistently yielding a quality cup.

All Aquiares coffee is picked by hand to ensure consistent high quality. Microlots, such as this one, are picked by a special team of skilled harvesters who are paid well above the daily rate for their exceptionalskill in picking the ripest cherries at each pass. Each tree is visited up to seven times during the harvest to ensure that only fully red ripe cherries are picked. The skilled hands of the pickers represent the farm’s most valuable asset. Pickers hail from the community of Aquiares, nearby towns, and even from the neighbouring country of Nicaragua. The farm ensures that all workers have a safe work environment and a comfortable place to live. Workers coming from further away can live in on-site housing and use a children’s day-care. The farm sponsors doctors’ visits for pickers and their families twice a week where nutritional health advice is also given. To take better care of its field workers, Aquiares has established first-of-its-kind physical therapy sessions and also a daily warm-up routine of exercise before work. Many pickers return each year, confirming success in providing a secure home in Aquiares.

As coffee cherries come from the field the same day that they are picked, they move into Aquiares’ wet mill. The farm produces fully washed coffees, honey processed coffees and naturals. This specific lot underwent the African Washed process, which began with the cherries being floated in water to remove any under or overripe cherries. The cherries are then de-pulped using the Penagos DCV 306 machine to remove the external fruit. The coffee is next moved to large plastic tanks filled with fresh local spring water. These tanks are then sealed, initiating a slow fermentation that lasts for two days. Once fermentation is complete, the coffee is washed thoroughly and transported to the mechanical dryers. The coffee is loaded and dried for 3 – 5 days, with temperatures ranging from 45˚C – 55˚C. Twice a day, there are two-hour breaks during this drying process to ensure a slow and even drying of the beans. This leads to a pinkish-toned parchment, and a blue-hued bean once hulled.

At Aquiares, they sought a processing method to produce a coffee with a complex flavour profile without any over-fermenting. Therefore, the introduced African Washed method attempts to mimic the bright flavour profile of coffees from Kenya.