Ureña Rojas Family - La Naciente - Chirripo, Costa Rica
The Ureña’s Love of Honey Honey processing is core to Costa Rica’s coffee industry and passionately favored by the Ureña Rojas family. It was originally invented to reduce water consumption while still achieving phenomenal flavors similar to that of natural coffees. The Ureña approach is unique in that they don’t use colors like yellow, red, or black to label the intensity of processing. This is due to the beans oxidating at different rates so colors vary across the bed. They also choose to not flotation sort since they’ve noticed inconsistencies due to uncontrolled fermentation due to the water that gets absorbed into the cherry. Since this key quality control step is skipped, they compensate with added training for their pickers to ensure the cherries are at their most optimal maturity during harvest. Since they own their own dry mill, hand sorting is done there to remove defected beans. Land Management The Ureñas have 100 hectares of land with 60 hectares containing mature produc