Take Me Home – Costa Rica

Description

Toffee, Marzipan, Vanilla

Sometimes you see something so perfect for your life, it screams, “take me home.” That happened to me with a lamp at Target the other day, and it’s going to happen to you as soon as you take a sip of this coffee. Sourced via our longstanding relationship with the Solis brothers in Costa Rica, these honey-processed beans are toffee nutty in the cup, with notes of vanilla, caramel, and a hint of soft citrus. Ahhhh… welcome home.

We’ve had the pleasure of working with the Solís family for the past 6 years for our Take Me Home coffee, and this year we’ve sourced yet another beautiful lot from them. The high-grown coffee cherries are hand-picked, quickly brought to their Don Oscar micro mill, and then red honey is processed for a lovely cup.

The family coffee business behind the Don Oscar farm and wet mill, now managed by brothers Horacio and Alejandro Solís, is in its fifth generation. Their father, Oscar Solís, a lifelong coffee farmer, was instrumental in the building of the family’s first processing site in 2013. Since Don Oscar passed away, the brothers have remained stewards of the family coffee legacy. With a management team composed entirely of extended family and a staff of 75 to manage the 60-hectare estate, the Solís brothers are now in charge of a large portfolio of coffees designed entirely by themselves and guided by generations of experience.

Coffee is a year-round effort for the entire family and one that requires rigid consistency according to their standards. The Don Oscar farms receive soil analyses annually and foliar feedings to maintain plant stability. The family has employed the same pickers, a group of indigenous families from Panamá who have come to Costa Rica for work for over 10 years in a row and greatly value their experience. Processing equipment is regularly calibrated by local experts, and drying is managed using a system of patios, raised beds, and mechanical dryers, for the purpose of keeping drying times slow and consistent regardless of local weather patterns. The overall goal, according to the Solís family, is for each bean to be perfectly controlled from picking to processing, so as to guarantee that the “life of the bean” will be vibrant and long-lasting.