La Mirella is an Olympia Coffee Roasting Co. gem in Costa Rica. We are so happy to work with Oscar Chacon and Francisca Cubillo, the dynamic husband and wife team who run Finca La Mirella and the Las Lajas mill. Today I had a perfect day touring their farm and mill, eating together, laughing together, talking business, talking family, and developing our relationship.

When Oscar was just 18 years old his father passed away leaving young Oscar his 8 hectare coffee Farm La Mirella. Before Oscar’s father died he left his son with one message: you must change the coffee production away from the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides as it is killing the land.

10 years later La Mirella was certified organic. Today La Mirella is honestly one of the most pristine coffee farms I have ever been to. Perfect Caturra and Bourbon coffee trees live under a dense canopy of shade. The soil is rich with a dense layer of rhizomes spreading throughout. Birds sing above and it’s cool under the shade trees allowing the fruit to develop slowly with great sweetness. No joke, a beautiful farm—one of the best I’ve seen.

Francisca and Oscar’s mill Las Lajas is a short walk away from La Mirella. The first step to processing is a sugar content test of the ripe cherries. This is something I’ve never seen. Cherries are put into a refractometer to measure the brix or sugars. Only coffee that measures a brix of 22 or above moves on to be La Mirella. Even when the coffee is grown at La Mirella, if the cherry is not sweet enough it will never carry the name. Francisca describes La Mirella as “the best of the best only, a micro lot within a micro lot”. All of the production of La Mirella is coming out as a honey process this year. Coffee is depulped and put on the African Drying Bed or on a patio under a greenhouse. The coffee slowly dries over about 3 days in the sun, constantly turned by hand and rake. After the coffee is dry it goes into what’s known as a resting period for about two and a half months. Then it will ship to us.

WE EXPECT NEW CROP LA MIRELLA LATE APRIL 2010

What a perfect day with such a lovely family that matches so ideally our values as sustainable, super high quality, progressive, passionate, coffee professionals.

Oliver-

Check out Olympia Coffee Roasting Co.’s Finca La Mirella set on Flickr