Costa Rica Tres Rios

Tres Rios is a small coffee-growing district in La Union canton, Cartago Province, just east of San Jose, and it carries a reputation well out of proportion to its size: Costa Rica’s own coffee institute, ICAFE, calls it “the Bordeaux of Costa Rica,” a comparison it traces to the volcanic soil left by nearby Irazu. The zone’s coffee history goes back to 1820, when San Jose’s original coffee-growing area first expanded into the surrounding provinces, and cultivation here grew fastest through the 1840s.

The growing zone itself is compact and unusually uniform: ICAFE puts its farms between 1,200 and 1,650 meters, on tropical-acidity volcanic ash soils that hold moisture well and let coffee roots spread easily. That altitude band, combined with a well-defined wet and dry season, is enough to earn nearly all of the region’s crop Strictly Hard Bean grading, Costa Rica’s own classification for the dense, closed-fissure beans altitude-grown Arabica produces. Harvest runs August through February, coinciding with the dry season, and starts noticeably earlier than at higher-elevation Costa Rican zones like Tarrazu.

Farms here grow the same Caturra and Catuai varieties common across the Central Valley, mostly wet-processed and patio-dried, the way the COOPEUNION cooperative’s El Roble mill in Tres Rios itself handles its own lot. In the cup, three dated Coffee Review lots spanning 2007 to 2011 agree on the outline: orange and floral top notes, a chocolate and nutty body, and a sweetness that on at least one lot reads as molasses, with the acidity ICAFE’s own cupping notes call “very high and fine” giving the whole cup its lift.