About the coffee
- Cupping notes: Balanced, good body, notes of caramel, green apple, orange, peach when roasted at medium
- Cultivation: shade-grown in rich, volcanic soil on coastal mountains near the Pacific, in the Tarrazú region of Costa Rica
- Altitude: 5,000-5,500 feet
- Tree type: Caturra, Catuai
- Preparation: fully washed, sun-dried
About the people who grow it
Top and bottom photos: Public Domain, Wikimedia
La Candelilla Estate, named after the abundant fireflies that light up the evenings, is a collection of farms comprising about 70 acres. The Sanchez family, multi-generation coffee growers and owners of La Candelilla Estate—nine siblings, nine farms—opened one of Costa Rica’s first micro-mills, having long desired greater traceability and control of the quality, efficiency, and cost of their own product.
They apply fair wage practices for their workers, and take care to use sustainable growing practices. Each member of the Sanchez family is directly involved in their coffee: picking, processing, cleaning the mill, and much more, and often combine harvests from the nine farms into lots, ultimately producing 15-20 containers of La Candelilla coffee per season.
The Sanchez family have been working this land for five generations. Until 2000, the nine brothers and sisters and their families separately managed their respective land. After years of planning the families pooled their resources and built the La Candelilla Estate & Micro Mill. It was the first of it’s kind in Costa Rica and set the stage for many small producers to follow suit . The micro mill explosion has a lot to do with the sophistication of the processing in Costa Rica.
With so many producers experimenting and taking control of their coffee the knowledge has exploded. The estate now produces 1000 bags of coffee a year and is highly regarded as one of the best coffee producers in the country. The family is one of the few producers in Costa Rica still using traditional fermentation but they have built a vast lagoon system that uses native plants to purify the water before it is returned to the river from which it came.
Tarrazú is a mountainous region south of the Central Valley in Costa Rica. The majority of Costa Rican coffee comes from Tarrazú, which has a strong and well-developed coffee culture. A humid climate, high altitude and rich volcanic soil contribute to conditions which produce high quality coffee.
They apply fair wage practices for their workers, and take care to use sustainable growing practices. Each member of the Sanchez family is directly involved in their coffee: picking, processing, cleaning the mill, and much more, and often combine harvests from the nine farms into lots, ultimately producing 15-20 containers of La Candelilla coffee per season.
The Sanchez family have been working this land for five generations. Until 2000, the nine brothers and sisters and their families separately managed their respective land. After years of planning the families pooled their resources and built the La Candelilla Estate & Micro Mill. It was the first of it’s kind in Costa Rica and set the stage for many small producers to follow suit . The micro mill explosion has a lot to do with the sophistication of the processing in Costa Rica.
With so many producers experimenting and taking control of their coffee the knowledge has exploded. The estate now produces 1000 bags of coffee a year and is highly regarded as one of the best coffee producers in the country. The family is one of the few producers in Costa Rica still using traditional fermentation but they have built a vast lagoon system that uses native plants to purify the water before it is returned to the river from which it came.
Tarrazú is a mountainous region south of the Central Valley in Costa Rica. The majority of Costa Rican coffee comes from Tarrazú, which has a strong and well-developed coffee culture. A humid climate, high altitude and rich volcanic soil contribute to conditions which produce high quality coffee.