COSTA RICA EL PINO

With the help of Esteban Zamora we are introducing this new lot from Costa Rica to our roastery for the first time - an exceptionally sweet, creamy, and well-balanced coffee.

FLAVOR PROFILE

Costa Rica El Pino stands out with its impressive flavor profile, featuring notes reminiscent of tropical fruits, chocolate, and plums. Its high acidity blends harmoniously with a creamy texture, creating complexity and a pleasant taste in every sip, defining the sensory experience.

85.5 QGRADING POINTS - green coffee quality evaluation

ROASTING PROFILE

With 50 bags in our roastery, we developed a roasting profile for espresso. The medium roast level aims to preserve the natural quality of the bean - clean, sweet, and complex. The precision for the desired profile is obtained through daily practice and advanced roasting technology - Loring Smart Roaster.

GREEN COFFEE INFORMATION

Esteban’s father has owned coffee farms for about 40 years and had already worked in the coffee industry for 10 years before starting his own plantation. Before building their own mill, the family sold coffee cherries to nearby cooperatives. Esteban’s true passion for coffee began when he worked alongside his father in the fields for three years during high school. During that time, he fell in love with the farm and started thinking about ways to improve its operations.

After completing his engineering studies, Esteban struggled to find work in Costa Rica or the United States. So, he decided to follow his dream of continuing the family tradition and cultivating coffee. Together with his brothers, Felipe and Jacob, they invested their savings in building a wet mill, applying their engineering skills. At the time, they had 5 hectares of their own plantation and purchased additional coffee cherries from five neighboring families.

Felipe, for example, works for an agricultural company, Resusa, specializing in plantation nutrition. He collects field data, takes soil and plant samples, analyzes them in a laboratory, and determines the nutrients needed to replenish the soil. The brothers also continue to improve their wet mills to increase annual production. Each harvest brings new opportunities for them to innovate and develop new processing techniques.

Esteban says their main goal is to provide high-quality coffee at a fair and sustainable price for both producers and consumers.

The name El Pino comes from a pine tree that once stood on the farm but was struck by lightning, becoming a symbolic landmark for the Zamora family.

The coffee variety is a first-generation hybrid (F1), a cross between Marsellesa and another variety from Ethiopia/Sudan. Currently, Starmaya is the only F1 hybrid propagated through seeds, as most first-generation hybrids are reproduced only through cloning or manual pollination - methods that are costly and limited in scale. These hybrids are relatively new to coffee cultivation, with only a few becoming available to farmers in the past 15 years in select countries. After showing promising results in Nicaragua, ECOM introduced this variety, naming it Starmaya.

For this lot, Esteban used a special natural processing technique. After selecting only the best cherries during harvest, they were washed and placed on raised beds for three days of partial drying, with occasional movement. The semi-dry cherries were then transferred into clean plastic bags and left for four days to encourage controlled fermentation.

After this stage, drying continued for an additional 20 days on concrete patios, where the cherries were turned every hour throughout the day.

This careful process enhances the coffee’s sweetness, complexity, and depth of flavor, making Costa Rica El Pino a truly remarkable lot.