1b La Esmeralda - Costa Rica 2021

The story behind this coffee starts 40 years ago, when my father began his career as a farmer. He had always been connected with our golden bean, either picking coffee or helping his fathers on the daily chores related to this crop.
On 2014 the farm La Esmeralda, which is part of our bigger farm Agua y Manto (9th place last year) was bought with great effort from all the family. At the beginning our priority was to produce avocados among other fruits from the region, as we got ourselves into agriculture we manage to appreciate all the virtues of this land and its great qualities.
As we already had some knowledge regarding coffee, we decided to start with a small field. The first question and challenge was deciding what variety to plant that will adapt the best at this great height. We then decided to try with different varieties and planted a few of each, after two years and based on our results, we decided to keep the geisha, SL28 and Costa Rica 95.
Growing coffee at this height is a great challenge that proves the patience and perseverance of the farmers. During this 5 years, we have not spare on any effort to try and produce one of the best coffees of the world.
The next big challenge that we came upon was the processing, even though our father had some experience, it meant we had to learn about this new activity, so we visited other micro mills with experience from the region, to get advice and learn about the different processes.
Thanks to Cup of Excellence, last year, we were able to build a new green house and with this we were able to try new processes.
We know we still have a lot of challenges ahead but we will keep moving forward with the conviction of producing great quality coffee in a sustainable way with our environment and our society.