La Minita – a gift from a fellow barista

La Minita - a gift from a fellow barista

The other day my friend Nic Borneman gave me a small bag of coffee with the promise that I would thoroughly enjoy its contents. Nic is the head honcho and barista at the fine Red Bank Coffee in Two Rivers. He has been in the coffee business for some time now, which is to say that he knows his coffee. So I was expecting his little gift to be something special, and it certainly was.

Nic had pre-ground the coffee to a courser grind for French press brewing, a method we both agree reveals more of the desirable qualities and nuances of high quality arabicas.

The coffee came from the well-known Hacienda La Minita plantation in Costa Rica. Last month I wrote about another wonderful Costa Rican coffee from the same central Tarrazu region. The quality of the La Minita was further proof that this region produces exceptionally fine coffees. La Minita means “little mine” or, to be specific to this plantation, “little gold mine.” It is thought pre-Colombian peoples once mined for gold on the land that now grows coffee.

Hacienda La Minita cares for approximately 1,700,000 coffee trees on 680 acres. That’s around 2,500 trees per acre. The farmers lovingly tend to each tree, employing a system of pruning 350,000 trees and transplanting 150,000 trees each year. It is inspiring to imagine all of the work that goes into an operation like Hacienda La Minita, especially when you realize that everything is done by 80 individual, full-time workers with hand tools.

That core group of workers and their families live directly on the farm. 150 additional workers are brought in periodically to perform weeding. That number grows to over 600 workers employed during the harvest. Cap the image of all of those trees and all of the work that goes into caring for them with the fact that they produce only a single crop of coffee each year. It’s an amazing undertaking.

La Minita Coffee Farm. Don't recall what website I got this image from.

The plantation resembles in many ways “company towns” of days gone by, but perhaps with greater concern for their workers. Hacienda La Minita workers take advantage of community vegetable and citrus gardens; on site housing, dental care and a medical clinic provided by the plantation; a worker’s association that assists with savings plans (Hacienda La Minita contributes matching funds to workers’ savings); and even a plantation soccer team and other social groups. The story of this farm, their history, how they run their business and treat their people is very appealing.

And their coffee ain’t too shabby either. La Minita is considered by many to be the world’s finest estate coffee. According to Nic, “La Minita uses only ‘first-quality’ classified coffee seeds from each step in the production process and finishes with a unique hand cleaning. This final step takes a virtually perfect product and, with over 30,000 worker hours of effort, transforms it into the very special coffee that is bagged for export as La Minita.”

La Minita coffee has been discussed in virtually every contemporary coffee reference work and feature articles about the coffee have appeared in magazines such as Financial World, The Wine Spectator, and Saveur. There is a wonderfully interesting article Jim Daniels on La Minita that appeared in Cigar Aficionado magazine (titled “A Passion for Taste,” Autumn 1995) that you can access online at the Cigar Aficionado website. (Click here to go to that article)

As I prepared and tasted my own French press pot of La Minita I jotted down words that came to mind as I drank. My first impression was of butterscotch, hints of those little butterscotch candies I loved as a child. It had a delightfully luxurious and oily mouthfeel. Hints of nuts and buttered toast, and even a little plum-like fruitiness caught my attention. There was a nice lingering aftertaste, not at all bitter and acidic. Nic was right, this was a truly delightful coffee.

Costa Ricans have rich coffee history

Costa Rican – drink this coffee; it’s the law

The law now requires you to plant and grow coffee on your property. Not much, just a few shrubs that you will be asked to tend so that they produce coffee cherries.

Of course that is not really required of people in the United States. But at one time it was apparently the law of the land in Costa Rica. While many citizens of this country would rightfully take umbrage at yet more government interference into their private lives and property, at least one nice thing did result from that old mandate in Costa Rica. The country and its citizens became very good at producing very good coffee.

Costa Rica is peppered with both large cooperative coffee plantations and small independent farms, big co-op mills that service the large farms and small “micro-mills” that the lone farmer and his family operate to process their own crops.

Costa Rica has an excellent climate and soil for growing coffee (along with fine cigar tobacco, a double bonus for the country). Flanked on either side by the Pacific Ocean and Caribbean Sea it benefits from warm tropical winds and rain. Volcanic mountain ranges also bookend a central highland plain area of rich volcanic soil. You could hardly ask for better growing conditions.

I recently enjoyed a cup of drip brewed Costa Rican from the Tarazzu region, more or less in the center of the country, south of San Jose. This region is dense with coffee farms and estates as it is deemed one of the best locations for growing coffee in a country rife with ideal conditions. The high altitude, rich soil and shade conditions favor a slow growth that helps produce outstanding Arabica coffee.

Coffees from this region are generally described by the coffee terms “classic” and “clean,” meaning that they are silky smooth, without defects, and extremely well balanced. Sometimes the best examples of a clean cup are also so clean as to be almost uninteresting, with nothing that stands out or grabs your attention. Of course, as we’ve said a number of times in this column, a lot can happen from tree to cup to influence the coffee you end up drinking.

The particular Costa Rican Tarazzu coffee that I was drinking was not what I would describe as a classic cup. It was, however, quite good. I spoke with the barista and asked about the coffee. They did not roast their own coffee on site, but purchased it from a well-known and high quality roasting company that supplies coffee shops all over the United States. It had been roasted to an upper medium, or full-city roast and was only a week off the roast.

I found it to be very well balanced. The aroma was pleasing, not overpowering at all but light and fresh and hinting of garden cucumbers still on the vine. The drink was smooth, yet displayed a little brightness or acidity. It also impressed with a note citrus and even a little nuttiness, almost like a blanched, unsalted peanut. The aftertaste wasn’t so great, being a little too acidic for me to give it five stars out of five (that is, if I did, in fact, use a star rating system). Overall, it was a very good coffee.

It struck me that it might have been the perfect coffee for the warm, sunny spring morning we had that day. Gone (hopefully) were the last remnants of winter, when I seem to be drawn to heavier, heartier and bolder coffees. Spring calls for a change of attitude and a change in coffees. I guess serendipity was with me that spring day.