Costa Rica - Vara Blanca SF 09

Café Solis y Cordero in Tarrazu is the 1st Place Winner at the 2024 Costa Rica Cup of Excellence for the Experimental Category, a noteworthy ascent from 2nd Place Overall in 2023. In 2024 too, they placed 5th in the 2024 Washed Category and 16th in Natural and Honey.

Founded in 2018 by the husband-and-wife team Ivan Solis and Leandra Cordero, Café Solis y Cordero represents the courageous efforts and hard-won accomplishments of the country’s leading specialty coffee producing families among the newer generation. Their rise to 1st Place in the 2024 COE Experimental Category recognizes their tenacious and meticulous approach to innovation aimed at producing finely differentiated specialty coffees of uncompromisingly high quality.

Growing up amid the inevitable influence of a centuries-old national coffee heritage, they witnessed coffee’s power to weave a viable social fabric among and across communities that rely on coffee cultivation as the primary source of livelihood while acting as an enabler of preserving and passing on family values and legacies enabled by the coffee farm lands.

As such, they regard coffee as a vital instrument for upholding the ethos of the authentic Costa Rican way of life, Pura Vida — understood as living life to the fullest, savoring simple pleasures, and maintaining an optimistic, proactive attitude within an equitably thriving society — and have taken on the task of doing their part in perpetuating it, through the work they do at their family’s micromill, Beneficio Sta. Fe, and farms Finca Voo and Vara Blanca.

Nestled in the renowned Tarrazú region, the micro-mill Beneficio Santa Fe serves as a fully-equipped and environment-friendly post-harvest processing hub. It is where Ivan and Leandra implement the appropriate protocols to boost the quality and value of the more traditional coffee varieties like Caturra and Catuai cultivated and harvested by the Los Santos area smallholder coffee farming families.

The farmers’ collaboration with Café Solis y Cordero affords them opportunities to attain the commensurate recognition and compensation for the specialty coffee-grade quality they produce, and contributes to strengthening the country’s reputation as an origin of distinctive flavor profiles.

Finca Voo, named by Ivan and Leandra after the Portuguese word for "flight," has been identified as the launchpad for realizing their young family’s loftier dreams of producing exceptional coffees. These coffees evoke Pura Vida in a way that protects nature, promotes the well-being of their workers, and highlights terroir, calling global attention to Costa Rica as a strong contender among origin countries of singular, higher-end specialty coffees.

The Caturra is a natural mutation of the traditional Bourbon. It made its way to Costa Rica by way of Guatemala from its provenance, Brazil. It is well-regarded by coffee farmers because of its predilection for better productivity than its parent due to its low height, which makes it easier to pick cherries from, and a degree of disease resistance — combined with good cup quality potential.

To achieve a well-rounded cup that is sweet and chocolatey enhanced by a subdued acidity, this Lot SF 09 underwent a special multi-step fermentation process.

It started with rinsing the whole coffee cherries using clean water before placing them in tanks to ferment for an initial 72 hours. The cherries were then placed on raised beds for another 72 hours to continue fermenting in the open air while simultaneously draining and wicking extraneous moisture before being pulped.

After that, the cherries with mucilage intact were spread out on the raised beds for the final drying phase which lasted for 14 days.