A new exciting process has been developed by Enrique for this year’s Tipica lot from La Mesa – it is called black wash. For this process the cherries are de-pulped and the skins are removed but all mucilage is left on the seeds. The coffee is put in a closed tank which is temperature controlled. It stays in the tank for 48 hours until it takes on a dark colour and after that it gets rinsed in clean water before being moved to the drying tables. The result is an incredibly clean coffee with a complex structure with intense notes of dark berries.
We are very proud to have been working with Enrique and the family since 2010. The Navarro family is incredibly warm and friendly and on top of that they produce, in our opinion, some of the best coffee we have ever come across. Enrique started as the manager of the farm at age 17 and it has been amazing to follow the progress.
In 2009 the two brothers Enrique and Josue decided to take over the family owned farms belonging to Monte Copey to produce some of the best coffee found in Costa Rica. They invested in a Penagos – a mechanical depulping machine – which was one of the first steps in their way to improve the production and quality. They also built 22 drying tables to get the coffee off the ground to avoid contamination and slow down the drying process.
Monte Copey is divided into 5 plots of land adding up to close to 20 hectares of which 15 is planted with coffee. All coffees are separated by farm, cultivar and picking date. The coffees are separated by picking-day, cultivar, plot of land and process. Everything is monitored carefully. On Monday every week during harvest Enrique drive for 2.5 hours to the lab in San José to try all his lots so that he can potentially change the processing according to what taste the best.
The same families that have returned to work at the farm for 20 years is handpicking the coffee. The pickers have been trained to only pick the perfectly ripe cherries and also to sort the cherries after the picking. 30 people are working in the field and 4 people are working at the micro mill during the harvest.
At Monte Copey they are working with sustainable farming and use only environmentally friendly fertilizers and no pesticides.Every year they do a soil analysis to be able to keep the soil in good health and secure a good yield. The annual production from the 15 hectares is about 300-350 bags of green coffee. When we started working with them in 2010 they produced only 80 bags so they have done a fantastic job growing their production without compromising the quality.
