This is me at Aquiares Coffee Estate, Costa Rica’s largest and oldest coffee plantation, where farmers and specialists have been growing coffee since 1880. As my tour guide Manuel explained, the product that so many people enjoy daily (and perhaps multiple times daily!) only comes to fruition after much time and effort.
The Aquiares Coffee Estate is a model of sustainability, having been Rainforest Alliance Certified since 2003 — it was also the first carbon-neutral coffee plantation. The coffee producers here have been studying how to make great coffee for over 100 years — they use only Arabica beans (the better of two kinds that make coffee) they grow them in the shade to produce a denser/more flavorful bean, and they test every batch at various steps in the production, from harvest, to washing, to sorting and finally to drying. From seedling to first harvest takes three years for one plant.
The growers have been studying how climate change has changed their production — the beans need to be grown at higher altitudes nowadays, and the unpredictability of the weather makes crop health more difficult to control. But they have also been developing hybrid breeds which they hope can provide more plant disease resistance and adapt to a warmer world.
The other pictures show a closeup of sun-dried coffee beans, bags of extremely precious eucalyptus-infused coffee beans, and an overlook on some of the Aquiares property. You can see the orange blossoms of the Coral trees that the company cultivates — when these trees shed, putting nitrogen back in the soil, is just after the coffee harvest, when the coffee plants need that nitrogen to recover.
Aquiares also pays their employees fair wages, and provides family housing and daycare and education for their temporary migrant workers. Their business model is inspiring.
