Last month, Cafe Imports announced a new documentary film series Ecos del Café: Narrativas de Productores Costarricenses. In the three-part series, the green coffee importers interviews some of their producer partners in Costa Rica to learn more about the people behind the coffee. In their first episode, Cafe Imports spoke with Alexander and Magali, siblings and third-generation coffee farmers at the Sierra San Luis Micromill in Grecia in the West Valley of Costa Rica.
Now, Cafe Imports is back with another installation of Ecos del Café. This time they are heading southeast to interview Diego Abarca Quiros of the Alto San Juan Micrmill in the Tarrazu region.
In the eight-and-a-half-minute video, Abarca discusses how he got into growing coffee and how he began producing specialty coffee. A fourth-generation coffee producer, Abarca inherited Finca San Calletano from his father at the young age of 15. The three-hectare farm has two distinct microclimates, one in the cloud-covered higher altitudes peaking at 1,650MASL and another in the lower areas, around 1,400MASL.
As a young farmer, Abarca began digging into the science behind coffee production, learning to analyze the crops via cuppings and metrics like brix tests for sugar content. He discovered that Finca San Calletano had all the qualities needed to produce specialty coffee, especially in the higher-altitude microclimate.
This led to Abarca creating the Alto San Juan micromill in 2015, where he could incorporate much of the processing techniques from his research into individual microlots. And in fact, from this research the coffees processed at Alto San Juan have over time switched from being washed to natural or honeyed, the two processes that Abarca states Finca San Calletano is best suited to produce.
It is yet another captivating look at the people behind the coffee we drink everyday. The ingenuity, the pride and joy, Ecos del Café once again shows that the art and passion in coffee begins long before the jute. For more information, visit Cafe Imports’ official website.
Zac Cadwalader is the managing editor at Sprudge Media Network and a staff writer based in Dallas. Read more Zac Cadwalader on Sprudge.
