Nestled in the beautifully lush region of Turrialba, Aquiares has been leading the way for speciality in Costa Rica. Home to around 1800 people, the farm is a home and very real community as well as a marvel of coffee production. An overwhelming majority of the farm's workers own their homes on the land and have a real stake in what they produce, an incredibly fresh approach by the head of the estate, Alfonso Robelo, who arrived to Turrialba in 1980.
Alfonso's son, Diego Robelo, was the first coffee producer I had a chance to meet almost a decade ago here in Edinburgh. Even then, Diego's passion and excitement at showcasing the plans for farming new hybrids and restoring the forest land around Aquiares was inspiring and left a lasting impression. It's truly an honour to share this coffee with Mutual's customers as roads converge again, years in the making.
This nano lot is an Anoxic Natural process F1 Esperanza cultivar. Esperanza is an F1 hybrid variety made by crossing the Sarchimor T-5296 and a wild Ethiopia (ET25) variety. It is reproduced through a tissue culture cloning process called somatic embryogenesis. The Esperanza cultivar is excitingly rare and Aquiares is one of the few farms to produce it on a commercial scale globally. Turrialba’s climate is well suited to growing this new variety and the world class team at Aquiares have proved more than up to the challenge of meeting its complex needs to create a beautiful end product.
