"Classic" Costa Rican profile, moderately bright in lighter roasts, with high potential for roast tones. Notes of almond brittle, pistachio ice cream, and dark cocoa. Good for espresso.
 
This lot is a blend of coffees producers in the town of Los Santos, Santa Cruz, near Costa Rica's Tarrazu region. Most farmers are growing a mix of Caturra and Catuaí cultivars at altitudes ranging from 1500 to 1600 meters above sea level. Farmers "float" the coffee cherry first before delivering to the nearby Palmichal mill where this lot was processed. Floatation is a simple, but effective, grading system where cherries are placed in buckets of water. Unripe coffee floats to the top and is separated out for lower grades, while the rest that has sunk to the bottom is processed as higher quality. This is the first line of quality separation, and helps to ensure more uniform ripeness in the top quality coffee. This lot was mechanically washed, meaning the coffee cherry and some of the sticky fruit mucilage are mechanically removed without fermentation. This is typicaly in Costa Rica, and calibrating the depulpers to remove almost all of the fruit mucilage is their equivalent of a "wet process" coffee (wet process coffee is typically fermented after the cherry is removed to bread down the sticky fruit mucilage so that it is easily washed away). The coffee is dried on cement patios for around 4 days, before finishing in large heat dryers called "guardioloas".