COSTA RICA LA LAGUNA ANAEROBIC

Hidden in the Westernmost slopes of the world renowned growing region of Tarrazu lies the little wet mill that could, Agropecuario Hellen of the Mora Family. Focused solely on wild natural processed coffee - Hellen's family utilizes their wonderful plantations growing on the fertile and temperate lands of Paritilla to create some of our favorite coffees every year. It’s quite impressive what this family has been able to accomplish with so little. To our knowledge they were one of the first families and micro wet mill projects to really risk their harvest and push natural process fermentations to some scary places. 

The family has had this 2 hectare plantation for quite a bit. Hellen and her family  planted the coffee in this land  about 10 years ago and it is located in a altitude of 1700 masl.

Every year we are happy and satisfied with the excellent coffees of the Mora family, They are really interested in the care of their plantations that is why they try to do it in the most sustainable way possible, using organic fertilizers with microorganisms from their own  farm that improves the root and for the soil to get better.

They do their best to harvest the cherries as uniformly ripe as possible. The following day they pass the fruit through a floating system to remove many imperfections. From there, the coffee berries are placed into fermentation tanks equipped with valves allowing gas to escape, but not enter. The fruit is left to rest in these tanks for 48-60 hours. Afterwards, the fermented cherries are moved directly to raised drying beds in a medium sized layer. The drying coffee cherries are moved/turned a few times a day and require about 25 days to reach optimal moisture content. The dried parchment coffee is bagged up and allowed to rest for a few weeks in their warehouse. Finally, the parchment is taken to the dry mill for export preparation.

They take the parchment to the dry mill at Tesoros dry mill, where they hull and sort the coffee by size, weight and color. From this same location we load the container to be shipped to the final destination.

We have worked with this anaerobic lot from La Laguna several times over the last few years. We love seeing what William Mora and his wife Hellen do with their lots, and we're always excited to see coffees from them arrive! On pour over and drip, the sweet cherry and molasses notes of this coffee shine through. When you pull it as espresso, more of the lime acidity and fermentation is present.