Costa Rica Red Honey El Coyote

This was one of the coffees that stood out from the pack when cupping offers in Costa Rica last March. I noted it was brighter, with delicate aromatic top notes. If the roasted coffee hadn't been on the cupping table, I would've guessed it was Pacamara. Finding out part of the farm has Villalobos variety planted helped make sense of the fragrant aroma. Villalobos is a natural dwarf mutation of Typica found mostly in Costa Rica, that often expresses interesting flavors and pronounced acidity. The "El Coyote" farm is run by Horacio and Alejandro Solis, in Tarrazu's Talamanca Sierra highland region, where they operate the Don Oscar micro mill, a name honoring their late father, Oscar Solis, who originally planted coffee on this land. Their farm is broken into 40 different lots, each with distinct demarcation, and a different mix of varieties. El Coyote is planted in Villalobos and Catuaí, and stretches upward of 2000 meters above sea level. This is a red honey process coffee, which means that after the outer cherry is pulped, the sticky fruit mucilage is left intact to the coffee seeds during the drying phase. It turns a reddish color when dry, which is how it got the name "red honey". We often find that red honey coffees have fruitier flavors than washed, and while I wouldn't call this coffee "fruity", it certainly offers clean fruit accents. Honey process coffees tend to present darker when roasting, and also produce a lot of chaff. It's not hard to roast, per se, but you should pay closer attention to time and the audible snaps, rather than physical coloring for judging roast degree.