Costa Rica Community Lot – La Laguna Washed

The communities program has been running with Coope Tarrazu since 2012, and was designed to help promote the individual characteristics of the coffee in ‘micro-zones’ of the Tarrazu region.

The coffee of the Tarrazú region is one of the most recognized in Costa Rica and in the world and represents around 40% of the national production. Most of the plantations are under shade, with different trees in the area.

In the district of San Marcos, La Laguna de Tarrazú is one of those communities that regularly contribute to our line up of Costa Rican coffees. This is a small community of producing families who have an annual production capacity of around 50 bags, with all 35 producing families working together to do so.

Each of the producing families depend on coffee as a livelihood, and are committed to working together through all stages of the coffee process to ensure the coffee that is harvested is of excellent quality.

Washed coffees here are produced with an eye on the environmental impact that traditional washed coffees can have. Cherries are picked when ripe as usual, and delivered to the mill where they enter a demucilager rather than a pulper. The demucilager works by spraying pressurised water at the cherry blasting the mucilage off as well as having ‘barbs’ on the inside to remove the flesh too. Cherry enters at the bottom and is spun around inside the barbed cylinder whilst being sprayed and exits at the top as a cleaned bean in parchment. This hugely reduces the amount of water used.

The cleaned bean is then pushed through a centrifugal pre-dryer to quickly remove excess water before being dried in a guardiola or on patios depending on demand. This process greatly reduces time and spent preparing the cherry for export, and leaves with better quality super clean coffee, as any opportunity for over-fermentation to occur has been removed.