Page 44 - APPD_Something's_Brewing_Nov/Dec'24

Sustainability
Cafeology
ISSUES FACED AT ROBERTO’S FARM

Costa Rica in
general

Costa Rica, 7 years ago,
produced >3 million sacks of
coffee annually. Now, this
has nearly halved to 1.6-1.8
million sacks. This is mainly
The drying barn (right) at El Llano farm due to a lack of rentability
with mountains in the distance (i.e. farmers are unable to
make enough of a return on
Roberto’s juicy fermentation was born out of their investment to remain
the need to keep up with the current trend of profitable). Roberto said
fermented coffees and their unique flavour that, ideally, a farmer needs
profiles. However, many fermentation >5 hectares to be profitable.
methods require significant investment in Labour costs, suboptimal
terms of equipment (silos, etc) and time (juicy weather conditions,
needs an extra 7-9 days to ferment before fluctuating market prices, etc
drying). From a farmer's point of view, they combine to put a strain on
need to decide if that investment is worth the coffee farmers. If coffee
risk of potentially ruining a batch of coffee (or farming is no longer viable,
creating an undesirable flavour) as well as the small-scale farmers often sell
trend disappearing and then owning land to larger farms or

expensive equipment that is now useless. developers. In the Dota

Therefore, the juicy process is intentionally region, where Roberto lives
low-tech, using large food-safe plastic sacks and farms, housing
and yeast rather than metal silos and funky development is becoming
reagents. During my visit, we cupped some more common as people
experimental batches of juicy using a different migrate out of the
yeast that was supposed to produce the same overcrowded cities
flavour in half the time. This would help into the countryside (many
production massively but the flavour was not now work from home so
comparable to the current method. they move to where it is
cheaper – and nicer!).
Loading the cherries into the plastic sacks is
time and labour-intensive too. Roberto is Therefore, land that was
looking for equipment to reduce this but he previously used to grow NOVEMBER/DECEMBER. 2024 | ISSUE 39
wants to see if the fermentation trend is here coffee is now being altered
to stay before he makes that investment for other uses. As the supply
(unless any cheap equipment goes on sale of Costa Rican coffee
from a closed farm – which happens more production continues to fall,
often than you think). the demand and price are
likely to increase.

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