The classic combo of milk chocolate and honeycomb fills your cup with sweetness, a gentle hint of apricot rounding it out for a well balanced coffee which will keep you coming back for another sip.
This coffee comes from a farm called El Oasis, a compact plot sitting at 1,600 metres in Costa Rica's Western Valley, just outside the town of Lourdes de Naranjo. Near enough the height of the top of Coronet Peak, then, and in a neighbourhood that punches well above its size. There are Cup of Excellence-winning mills within sight of this one. El Oasis is a bit smaller than El Manantial, the family's flagship, and turns out around 6,000kg of fresh cherry a year. Not much, in the scheme of things.
The family is the Arrieta Barbozas, and their mill is called ARBAR, the name spliced together from Carlos ARrieta and Maria BARboza. The whole operation is arranged around the family home. Drying beds, depulpers, nurseries. Sheep, chickens and goats wander through it all, part of a push to keep the place as self-sufficient as they can manage. If you've spent time on a lifestyle block, you'd recognise the setup immediately. ARBAR mostly runs Caturra and Catuai, with a small amount of Villa Sarchi in the mix and plans for some micro-lot plantings down the track.
Between them, Caturra and Catuai are the backbone of Costa Rican coffee. Caturra is a natural dwarf mutation of Bourbon, first spotted in Brazil in the early twentieth century, and it brings crisp sweetness and a bright citrus acidity. Catuai came later, a 1940s cross of Caturra with the vigorous Mundo Novo, bred to keep the compact shape while lifting the yields. Grown high and handled properly, both give you a clean, balanced cup with chocolate, caramel and a bit of soft fruit. They sit together easily.
The honey processing is Costa Rica's calling card, and it started out as a workaround. An earthquake in the late 2000s cut water supply to producers mid-harvest, government restrictions followed, and mills had to find a way to process coffee without it. The method: pulp the cherry, then leave some of the sticky mucilage on the seed while it dries. How much you leave decides the colour, and white sits at the light end of the scale. Least mucilage, quickest drying, most attention required. What you get lands between a washed and a natural. Cleaner and more defined than a natural, with a sweetness and soft fruit character that a washed coffee tends to sand off. It suits the Western Valley climate, and it lets the farm and the variety come through. Carlos has been doing it long enough to make it look easy, which it isn't.
We found him by accident. In 2013, Steve Leighton was cupping at the Exclusive Coffees offices and hit a sample labelled only "Carlos Arrieta." No farm name, no mill name, nothing. It stood out anyway. Carlos had owned the land for years at that point and had never once met a buyer. His cherry went to the cooperative, and that was that. One sample on a cupping table changed the shape of his business. Hasbean joined Ozone in 2018 and we picked the relationship up where it stood, and Roland, our Green Buyer, has been back more times than he can count.
Coffee runs deep in this family. Son Nacho works on the farm and has taken to cupping and quality control. Esteban now works for Exclusive Coffees, our exporting partner in Costa Rica. And last time we visited, the local firemen turned up at the house to collect some of Maria's roasted coffee. She learned to roast as a child, over a fire, alongside her father.
- Country: Costa Rica
- Region: Western Valley
- Area: Lourdes de Naranjo
- Producer: Carlos Arrieta
- Farm: El Oasis
- Micromill: Arbar
- Elevation: 1,600 m.a.s.l.
- Varietals: Caturra and Catuai
- Process: White honey