Coffee in Costa Rica

All about Coffee in Costa Rica…..Today you can wake up and smell the coffee roasting as you wander the streets near the Central Market (Mercado Central). In any cafe or restaurant, you can buy a hot cup of sweet, milky café con leche to remind you of the bean that built San José.

San José was more or less a forgotten backwater of the Spanish empire until the first shipments of the local beans made their way to Europe late in the 19th century. Soon San José was experiencing a boom. Coffee planters with their new wealth and craving culture, imposed a tax on themselves to build the aforementioned Teatro Nacional (National Theatre), San José's most beautiful building. The profits from coffee also built the city a university.

Coffee has always grown really well in the city due to its climate. The Central Valley, in which the city sits, has the perfect climate. At 1,125m (3,690 ft.) above sea level, San José enjoys spring-like temperatures year-round.

Coffee production began in 1779 in the Meseta Central area of Costa Rica, an area with near perfect soil and climatic conditions for this type of plantation. A native plant of Ethiopia, the blend introduced to Costa Rica had been first cultivated in Saudi Arabia and is therefore known as the Arabica.

Coffee growing soon surpassed cocoa, tobacco, and sugar in importance and by 1829 it had become the major source of foreign revenue. As a non-perishable commodity in an age of slow and costly transport, coffee proved to be the ideal product and shortly after became the nation’s major export, a position it has maintained until recent years, creating a producers wealthy elite that dominated the governmental circles all through the second half of the 19th century. After coffee exports were sent directly to Britain in 1843, the British began investing heavily in the industry, becoming the principal purchaser of Costa Rican coffee until World War II.

The hand picked berries are trucked to processing plants, where they are then scrubbed and washed to remove the fruity outer layer and the gummy substance surrounding the bean is dissolved. The pulp is returned to the slopes as fertilizer and was sometimes dumped in rivers, until  a recent enforcement of health laws put a stop to most of it. The moist beans are then laid out to dry in the sun in the traditional manner. The leather skin of the bean is then removed by machine-rubbing, and the beans are sorted according to size and shape before being vacuum-sealed to retain the fragrance and slight touch of acidity characteristic of the great vintages of Costa Rica.