The Catuai began to be widely planted by coffee farmers across Costa Rica due to its proven prospects for higher yields compared to the indigenous varieties Typica and Bourbon, while delivering on the potential for good cup quality — as had been observed in earlier adopters like Guatemala and Honduras — following its introduction to the local agricultural landscape in the 1980s. Coinciding with the building momentum of the Green Revolution, which promoted an agroforestry mindset and its accompanying environment-friendly practices, Costa Rica-grown Catuai (alongside Caturra) grew in regard as a reliable and sensorially satisfactory crop.
Catuai is a cultivar with Brazilian origins, having been developed by the Instituto Agronomico (IAC) in Sao Paulo, by cross breeding the exceptionally productive Mundo Novo and the usefully compact Caturra. The relevance at the farm-level is that more Catuai trees can be grown in a given area because of their small stature, allowing the plants to be placed nearer to each other, for example compared to Typica and Bourbon.
Their shape and height also make it physically easier to apply necessary treatments to the plants in the off-season, and at harvest season, to hand-select the properly ripe cherries, contributing to less tedious and more efficient work for the pickers.
At Hacienda Copey, yellow-fruited and red-fruited Catuai thrive owing to conservation-oriented cultivation practices carried out by a dedicated maintenance team, whose critical tasks include manual weed control using machetes, shade adjustment, pruning, and soil condition checks, among others.
A commitment to ripeness underpins every harvest season at Hacienda Copey. It is fulfilled through a multi-prong approach involving farm managers’ hands-on supervision and guidance of the pickers, sorting and re-sorting by hand at different stages prior to the fermentation phase, and cherry ripeness-status classification, which allows for incentivizing pickers accordingly. As a further safeguard for quality, the cherries are additionally sorted by flotation, and also using a siphon machine.
Before proceeding to the processing proper, in the case of Catuai, Red and Yellow cherries are segregated for more specific direction of the processing technique, with the intention to uncover and convey the flavor characteristics specific to each, ensuring that the resultant coffee clearly reflects variety and terroir.
For instance, to direct the Don Kazu Red Catuai Micro-lot’s character toward intense tropicality with crisp highlights and a rich, chocolatey undertone, a Thermal Anaerobic process was implemented. It entailed an eight-day anaerobic fermentation phase in Grainpro bags kept in the relatively warm environment of the green house, during which the cherries were stirred within the bags thrice daily.
The 27-day drying phase that followed was implemented in two stages. First was outdoors on raised beds, at the end of which visible traces of moisture were skimmed off the coffee. For the next and final stage to conclude drying, the whole cherries were moved into a green house, where they were spread out in thin layers on raised beds. In both stages of the drying phase, a dedicated team diligently monitored and regularly shifted the coffees until the desired parameters were met.
