This honey processed coffee comes to us from Costa Rica! More specifically a beautiful area located in Copey, within Costa Rica’s renowned Tarrazú Coffee Region, Cedrela is a family-owned farm managed by Jorge Ureña and his family, a third-generation coffee farmer. This coffee is cultivated under the shade of diverse tree species commonly found in Costa Rican coffee plantations, banana, poró, guava, citrus, and avocado trees, among others, create an ideal environment for producing some of the country’s finest coffee at an elevation of 2000 meters above sea level.
After being carefully harvested, red cherries are taken in for micro-milling. The heavy cherries sink and go into the pulper (peeling machine), while the lighter beans float away. In this stage, the machine will take only specific beans size (third selection) and leave the mucilage intact. When you read the words honey process, it means we keep all those tasty sugars from the mucilage on the bean.  Unlike other processes, the peel is removed, BUT they don’t wash away the mucilage, which has the added environmental benefit of using less water. Coffee seeds have a second peel or skin called parchment. The parchment layer is removed after the drying process. This is where the mucilage plays an important role. In the drying process, the sugars from the mucilage will oxidize and add more taste to the coffee beans. The beans are dried in the sunbeds for about 15 days. After all this work, the coffee needs to nap. The coffee rests for the ideal time frame of 30 days, which allows the flavors to settle. The next step is removing the second peel, the parchment. At this point, we move the beans to the milling machine, which removes the parchment and sorts the beans yet again! But this time it’s sorted by size, shape, and density. The coffee is ready to be graded for quality, which is a whole other massive topic!
