This coffee comes to us from the "Puente Tarrazú” micro mill, located in the prolific León Cortés municipality. As a light, or “yellow” honey process bourbon, the flavor and texture balance is wonderful: syrupy on the palate with bright tropical fruit flavors, chocolate icing, and toasted coconut. Costa Rica's Micro Mills For a long time, Costa Rica has been well-known for its exemplary cooperatives, and it still is. Coops here are large, stable, supportive enterprises and part of a thriving environmentally-friendly agricultural sector that Costa Rica's federal government seriously supports. Despite the benefits of cooperative farming, a “micro-mill revolution” began in Costa Rica in the early 2000s, as small-scale centralized processing sites began emerging on family estates. This local entrepreneurship and access to select farms created a brand new market for Costa Rica. Individual farms became new brands, competition increased, higher prices ensued, and a range of cup profiles that Central America hadn’t seen before suddenly renewed the roasting world’s appreciation for Costa Rica’s potential. Puente Tarrazú was formulated in 2004 by Rodolfo Rivera Rodriguez and 5 neighboring producers. The processing center includes both a wet mill and dry mill—so the producers themselves, despite the modest farm sizes, are producing fully exportable green coffee, and designing the exact profiles they want to present. "Yellow honey” refers to a depulping style that aims to remove slightly more mucilage from the coffee seed than is typical in a fully washed depulping, in this case achieved using a demucilaginator, or aqua-pulper, which pressure-washes the mucilage from the seed to a degree specified by the processor. Using machines like these allow producers to fine-tune their exact level of mucilage when processing honeys and has led to a veritable rainbow of color designations (black, red, orange, yellow, white) all of which reference the color of the mucilage as it oxidizes during drying. Exclusive Coffees Exclusive Coffees, the exporter of Puente Tarrazú's coffee, focuses solely on quality assurance, marketing, and logistics for so-called “micro-mills”, and has deep relationships throughout Tarrazú as well as the West and Central Valleys, and Chirripó. Exclusive has cornered the market on this style of production in Costa Rica and manages a staggering volume of microlot coffees in a given harvest, cupping each and every outturn from their more than 50 micromill partners, for whom they provide quality feedback, processing input and collaboration, promotion to buyers, and all export logistics.
