Every month we will bring you two brand new, truly exceptional coffees. Bringing together bright and vibrant coffees from producers that we work closely with, always in line with the changing seasons. This box is an opportunity for us to share our most exciting micro-lots, never repeating a coffee within a calendar year. We roast and ship these coffees at the beginning of each month so all new orders placed will be not be shipped immediately.
Box 019 will ship on the 1st of August with a focus on Costa Rica. We love Costa Rican coffee, we have a few farms that we always buy from there and have visited twice to build stronger relationships and improve our understanding of the farms and producers that we work with there. I wanted to break this month’s newsletter into three sections, one a short quite general overview of the country and it’s history of coffee cultivation and then a section on each of the two farms we’ve included coffee from in this month's box; Aquiares and Cafe Ceres.
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Los Encinos
Cafe Ceres is the name of a micromill located in the mountains of Tarrazú, a region south of Costa Rica’s capital San Jose. Cafe Ceres was established by Stephanny Fernandez Elizondo and her mother Alexandra in 2019. The mother, daughter duo have worked together for years preparing for this endeavour of owning and operating a mill, their aim is to achieve constant growth by focusing on improvements in quality each day. This 100% Catuai was processed very carefully to avoid the defects honey processed lots can sadly be prone to. The coffee cherries were sorted via floatation to remove underripe and overripe fruit and were then fermented for 72 hours then pulped, before being fermented for an additional 48 hours. Finally the coffee was dried on raised beds for 14 days while being moved every two hours to ensure uniform drying.
- Taste
- Tinned Peach, Marmalade, Funky
- Origin
- Costa Rica
- Region
- Tarrazu
- Varietal
- Catuai
- Process
- Honey
- Altitude
- 1850 masl
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Aquiares Esperanza
This year we’ve purchased a few different lots from Aquiares as we have done every year going back to the early days of Round Hill. This particular lot is a ‘African Washed’ Esperanza, African Washed infers that the processing was somewhat similar to the traditional Kenyan ‘double soak’ method where there are two stages of fermentation as the coffee is dry fermented after pulping before being washed or wet fermented (whereas typically washed coffees are wet fermented directly from the pulper and then dried. This additional stage of fermentation adds a depth and intensity of flavour that if done well as in this case still retains the clarity of flavour and elegance of a washed coffee. We love to see it. Recently we’ve noticed a large increase in the number of ‘washed’ coffees with extensive pre-wash-fermentation, it’s exciting to see but also worth remembering how ahead of the game Kenyan coffee was for such a long time.
- Taste
- Pear Drops, Toffee Apple
- Origin
- Costa Rica
- Region
- Turrialba
- Varietal
- Esperanza (Ethiopian Landrace)
- Process
- African Washed
- Altitude
- 1200 masl
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