Archers Costa Rica Copey Red Catuai SF 22 Coffee

The farm and producer

Café Solis y Cordero in Tarrazu is the 1st Place Winner at the 2024 Costa Rica Cup of Excellence for the Experimental Category, a noteworthy ascent from 2nd Place Overall in 2023. In 2024 too, they placed 5th in the 2024 Washed Category and 16th in Natural and Honey.

Founded in 2018 by the husband-and-wife team Ivan Solis and Leandra Cordero, Café Solis y Cordero represents the courageous efforts and hard-won accomplishments of the country’s leading specialty coffee producing families among the newer generation. Their rise to 1st Place in the 2024 COE Experimental Category recognizes their tenacious and meticulous approach to innovation aimed at producing finely differentiated specialty coffees of uncompromisingly high quality.

Growing up amid the inevitable influence of a centuries-old national coffee heritage, they witnessed coffee’s power to weave a viable social fabric among and across communities that rely on coffee cultivation as the primary source of livelihood while acting as an enabler of preserving and passing on family values and legacies enabled by the coffee farm lands.

As such, they regard coffee as a vital instrument for upholding the ethos of the authentic Costa Rican way of life, Pura Vida — understood as living life to the fullest, savoring simple pleasures, and maintaining an optimistic, proactive attitude within an equitably thriving society — and have taken on the task of doing their part in perpetuating it, through the work they do at their family’s micromill, Beneficio Sta. Fe, and farms Finca Voo and Vara Blanca.

Nestled in the renowned Tarrazú region, the micro-mill Beneficio Santa Fe serves as a fully-equipped and environment-friendly post-harvest processing hub. It is where Ivan and Leandra implement the appropriate protocols to boost the quality and value of the more traditional coffee varieties like Caturra and Catuai cultivated and harvested by the Los Santos area smallholder coffee farming families.

The farmers’ collaboration with Café Solis y Cordero affords them opportunities to attain the commensurate recognition and compensation for the specialty coffee-grade quality they produce, and contributes to strengthening the country’s reputation as an origin of distinctive flavor profiles.

Finca Voo, named by Ivan and Leandra after the Portuguese word for "flight," has been identified as the launchpad for realizing their young family’s loftier dreams of producing exceptional coffees. These coffees evoke Pura Vida in a way that protects nature, promotes the well-being of their workers, and highlights terroir, calling global attention to Costa Rica as a strong contender among origin countries of singular, higher-end specialty coffees.

The coffee and the process

A natural-processed Catuai from Finca Voo won 2nd Place at the 2023 Costa Rica Cup of Excellence. The process involved rinsing the coffee cherries with clean water and then directly laying them out to sun-dry on raised beds for 19 days.

The Catuai began to be widely planted by coffee farmers across Costa Rica due to its proven prospects for higher yields compared to the indigenous varieties Typica and Bourbon, while delivering on the potential for good cup quality — as had been observed in earlier adopters like Guatemala and Honduras — following its introduction to the local agricultural landscape in the 1980s. Coinciding with the building momentum of the Green Revolution, which promoted an agroforestry mindset and its accompanying environment-friendly practices, Costa Rica-grown Catuai (alongside Caturra) grew in regard as a reliable and sensorially satisfactory crop.

Catuai is a cultivar with Brazilian origins, having been developed by the Instituto Agronomico (IAC) in Sao Paulo, by cross breeding the exceptionally productive Mundo Novo and the usefully compact Caturra. The relevance at the farm-level is that more Catuai trees can be grown in a given area because of their small stature, allowing the plants to be placed nearer to each other, for example compared to Typica and Bourbon.

Their shape and height also make it physically easier to apply necessary treatments to the plants in the off-season, and at harvest season, to hand-select the properly ripe cherries, contributing to less tedious and more efficient work for the pickers.

With the same process and variety that led to Café Solis y Cordero’s Top 2 finish at the 2023 Cup of Excellence, this SF 22 Lot expresses rich and ripe sweetness complemented by crisp acidity.