Doña Maria's in Buena Vista

By The Coffee Company CR Field Team

Finca La Quebrada sits at 1,450 metres above Naranjo, on a single hectare Doña Maria Barboza has farmed since 1998. Fourteen rows of Villa Sarchí, a dwarf mutation of Bourbon bred for exactly this kind of steep, wind-exposed slope, make up almost the entire lot.

A rented depulper and six seasons of notes

Doña Maria doesn't own a wet mill. Every harvest, she rents time on a neighbour's depulper and brings her own notebook — pulping times, ambient temperature, how the mucilage looked on day three of the honey rest. Six seasons of that notebook is the reason her honey process lots taste the same, harvest after harvest, in a region where consistency is unusual.

They asked what I wanted the coffee to taste like before they asked what it cost.

That first conversation, in 2020, is why we still buy her entire lot outright every year rather than sampling it against other farms. It scored 87.75 this harvest, the highest of any lot from Naranjo we cupped.