Costa Rica Aquiares Estate Espresso

• Country: Costa Rica
• Region:  Aquiares, Turrialba
• Farm:  Aquiares Estate is one of Costa Rica’s largest and most historic coffee farms
• Variety: Obata & Marselessa
• Processing: Natural
• Altitude: 1100-1400 MASL

The roaster's story:

"This lot is picked by a selected team of skilled harvesters who are paid well above the daily rate for their exceptional skill in picking only the ripest cherries”

Each tree is passed and 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. As coffee cherries come directly from the field the same day that they are picked, they are then moved into Aquiares’ on-site wet mill.

This natural lot of Obatá & Marsellesa has been floated for density (with all floaters being removed) and then immediately moved to the farm's solar dryer patios (large greenhouses with ceramic floors) for pre-drying. After 2-3 days of pre-drying on the ceramic floors, they are moved to the farm’s raised beds, also in the covered greenhouses, where they slowly dry for around 10 days. Finally, the beans are sent to mechanically dry in a Guardiola for a day to complete the process.

“In 2012, Aquiares became the first farm in Costa Rica to fulfil the requirements of the Rainforest Alliance Climate Module”
 

Aquiares is strongly committed to, and has become an international leader in, environmental sustainability. The farm has long seen the connection between agricultural, environmental, and social health. The family have planted over 50,000 shade trees (a total of 40 different species), created natural forestry buffers around streams and rivers, prune each individual tree independently, and rotate their coffee plots with new trees to give the soil a ‘rest’.

In 2007, the farm was among the very first to try to calculate its carbon balance. Today, Aquiares is the main test plot for an ongoing project between the CIRAD Institute of France and CATIE University of Costa Rica. The “Carbon-Flux project” measures greenhouse gas exchange between the farm plot and the atmosphere over long-time horizons. This research station is the only one of its kind in the world, capable of accurately measuring the emission-sequestration balance of a hectare of shaded coffee. With this tool, the researchers are developing a model that can be used by any coffee farmer in the world to estimate the carbon sequestration potential of their farm. This project is part of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change research efforts. Aquiares is not only 100% carbon neutral, but actually carbon negative.