Costa Rica - William Mora Anaerobic Natural

Wet Mill: Agropecuaria Hellen
Region: Los Santos
Sub-Region: Parritilla
Altitude: 1700 masl
Lot size: 1 hectares
Variety: Catuaí

Producer Story
Hidden in the Westernmost slopes of the world renowned growing region of Tarrazu lies the little wet mill that could, Agropecuario Hellen of the Mora Family. Focused solely on wild natural processed coffee - Hellen´s family utilizes their wonderful plantations growing on the fertile and temperate lands of Paritilla to create some of our favorite coffees every year. It’s quite impressive what this family has been able to accomplish with so little. To our knowledge they were one of the first families and micro wet mill projects to really risk their harvest and push natural process fermentations to some scary places.
We love and are so proud of Hellen’s work, William’s daughter, she is so involved in the project. She is the manager of this micro mill and helps his dad with the farm management as well. Very exciting to see a young woman taking over the family farm and mill.

Lot Description:
La Chirascuasa is a 1 hectare farm and is located at 1700 masl in Parritilla. The farm was bought by the Mora family 8 years ago and they started growing Caturra and Catuai. The name comes from the amount of chirascuasas present on the farm, which are like small chickens that stay in the mountains and have a curious sound.
Since they planted this area, they have been maintaining and renovating the farm. One of their priorities is to take care of the environment; therefore they don’t use herbicides and instead they cut the weeds manually which takes much more work-but it’s worth it to them. They strategically fertilize 3 times a year and apply products against leaf rust two or three times a year as well.

Processing:
Of course, they do their best to harvest the cherries as uniformly ripe as possible. The following day they pass the fruit through a floating system to remove any imperfections. From there, the coffee berries are placed into fermentation tanks equipped with valves allowing gas to escape, but not enter. The fruit is left to rest in these tanks for 48-60 hours. Afterwards, the fermented cherries are moved directly to raised drying beds in a medium sized layer. The drying coffee cherries are moved/turned a few times a day and require about 25 days to reach optimal moisture content. The dried parchment coffee is bagged up and allowed to rest for a few weeks in their warehouse. Finally, the parchment is taken to the dry mill for export preparation.

Dry milling
They take the parchment to the dry mill at Tesoros dry mill, where they hull and sort the coffee by size, weight and color. From this same location we load the container to be shipped to the final destination.