Costa Rican SHB Tarrazu – San Antonio – Community Coffee

Description

A very tasty new Costa offering supporting a great program!

The Community Coffee program with CoopeTarrazu has made a real impact on the communities that deliver their cherry to this mill. This program has allowed them to separate the lots from specific communities that score over 86 points and pay a quality premium, which the individual communities receive and decide as a group how the money will be used to improve their coffee production and livelihood. The premiums can be used to build roads, large water tanks to store fresh water for the community, roofs for schools, and many other projects.

While some of the best individual producers in Costa Rica have built their own micromills to segregate their coffee and capture the higher market for microlots, many smallholder producers of high caliber do not have their own facilities, and still deliver cherry to cooperatives. This is where CoopeTarrazu comes in. Microlots in cooperatives can be controversial, but CoopeTarrazu has made a commitment to improve the lives of its members and offer them the opportunity of gaining higher quality premiums for their best coffees. This is why CoopeTarrazu developed the Community Coffees project, in which cherry is collected from high-altitude communities at the peak of the harvest, and has traceability to the community or microregion, as opposed to a generic SHB Tarrazu. The results of this program have been phenomenal.

Tasting Notes:
A very cool, jazzier than average Costa. Nice and bright with decently stronger floral and fruit tones. The cup has great balance with a floral versus nutty/chocolate type cup. Especially as the cup cools, one gets a bit of fruit poking out in the cup that is hard to pick up when piping hot, not overdone but very tasty. Great floral and sweet aromatics.

Roasting Notes:
A very clean cup that can range from light to dark, but we found it best to avoid extreme roasts – very light and it is front-loaded with acidity; super dark and it is a bit edgy and nondescript. Anywhere in between is quite lovely.