Coffee Landscapes: Specialty Coffee, Terroir, and
Traceability in Costa Rica
Julia Smith
Abstract
Coffee with the right traits can command impressive
prices in the specialty coffee market. While much of the
attention to terroir—the taste of place—in coffee has focused
on region, the details of place matter too. For farmers, paying
attention to the details of coffee landscapes is important to
create the distinctive flavors prized in these markets. This
article explores how farmers in the Tarraz u coffee region of
Costa Rica use systems of traceability based on details of the
landscape and the coffee that grows in it to create coffee that
“tastes of something.” Instead of seeing traceability and ter-
roir as different kinds of production with different logic,
these farmers see traceability as a key piece of terroir-based
high-value production. [specialty coffee market, Costa
Rica, traceability, landscapes, terroir]
The details of coffee landscapes are consistently
becoming more important to the high-end coffee mar-
ket. High-value food and drink are increasingly
grounded as the product of a particular place, as well
as a certain (kind of) producer. Whether framed as ter-
roir or “a taste of place” (Besky 2014; Trubek 2008) or
through the idea of an artisanal producer (Paxson 2012;
Schnell and Reese 2014), distinctive food and drink
commands attention and a higher price in the market-
place. Coffee is no exception. The landscapes in which
coffee is grown—bucolic towns sitting within lush
mountain valleys, where fields full of shrubs with
shiny green leaves turn first white with flowers and
then red with ripe coffee—feel like stable natural phe-
nomena, in which fixed geographical features of the
landscape exist. However, these landscapes are also
cultural maps of places that exist only because the peo-
ple living there perceive them as unique identifiable
Julia Smith is an Associate Professor of Geography and Anthropol-
ogy at Eastern Washington University. Her research interests include
food and drink as well as the economics of farm life in Latin America
and the United States.
Culture, Agriculture, Food and Environment ISSN 2153-9553, eISSN 2153-9561. © 2018 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights
reserved. DOI: 10.1111/cuag.12103
places. The idea of landscapes as cultural models for
the way people perceive a set of natural and social phe-
nomena has been important in human geography for a
long time (Bender 2006; Neumann 2011; West 2006). In
one framing of this idea, Bender (2002, 103) says
“Landscapes are created out of people’s understanding
and engagement of the world around them. They are
always in the process of being shaped and reshaped.”
In agricultural settings, terroir—the special charac-
teristics of a landscape that give the products of that
place its unique characteristics—is the idea through
which these landscapes are mapped and recreated.
While terroir is often characterized as “a fixed and
territorially defined conception of nature,” anthropo-
logical studies have made clear that terroir is actually
“a vibrant, constantly changing discursive strategy for
advancing the claims of individual, regional, and even
national interests” (Demossier 2011, 289). Terroir mys-
tifies and naturalizes agricultural landscapes that are
being transformed and recreated in important ways.
Traceability in agriculture refers to the capture of
information at all points on the supply chain of a food
item to allow each step—production, handling, and
processing—to be identifiable. Traceability is often con-
ceptually linked to reducing operating costs, increasing
productivity, and improving consumer safety in indus-
trial food systems (Regattieri, Gamberi, and Manzini
2007, 351–2). When agricultural products pass directly
from producer to consumer, a formal system of trace-
ability is not necessary; instead, trust and personal
knowledge serve the same purpose. For example, Fair
Trade activists initially imagined an informal trust-
based system for coffee linking producers, sellers, and
consumers. However, it has turned into an impersonal
system involving formal traceability (Raynolds 2009).
This article explores how Costa Rican farmers are
reframing traceability in the interest of terroir, using it
to manage their coffee in a way that increases the
chances of creating exceptional coffee. These ideas that
are often seen as contradictory have been reframed as
complementary by high-end coffee farmers in Costa
Rica.
 This analysis is based on a period of ethnographic
research during the spring and summer of 2011 in the
area of southern Costa Rica known in coffee terms as
Tarraz
u, including the counties of Dota, Tarraz
u, and
Leon Cort
es. This work included visits to 50 micromills
and interviews with over 70 farmers involved in pro-
ducing microlot coffee for the high-value coffee
market, as well as with government representatives,
middlemen, and co-operative managers. Micromills
are small-scale coffee processing systems designed to
create small-batch coffee, called microlots. Micromills
are mainly used by individual farmers who are trying
to sell their coffee to foreign roasters or with the help of
middlemen; most process from a few hundred to some-
what over 10,000 kg of coffee. However, some are
managed by processors who buy coffee, including one
co-operative that runs both a large mill and a micromill
side by side, each producing different coffee for differ-
ent markets. These farmers represent a small but
growing part of the coffee market; almost all of them
are working the farms that their families have owned
for generations in this part of Costa Rica. In Tarraz
u still larger batches of coffee were created at the regional
and elsewhere in Costa Rica, most producers know
about the high-value market organized around micro-
mills and want to get involved in it, although those
who are not involved have only a vague understanding
of why some coffee is so much more valuable than
theirs. I became interested in this question precisely
because farmers in other parts of Costa Rica, where I
was previously working, had many questions about
why they had not been able to get buyers interested in
their coffee.
Traditional Coffee Markets and the Costa Rican
Coffee Landscape
Until the 1970s, coffee was generally treated in the
international market as a more or less undifferentiated
commodity. Most coffee was sold by large vendors
through brands such as Maxwell House and Folgers,
with small amounts going through smaller “high-end”
or regional coffee vendors. Within this system, prices
varied only slightly, based on features such as species
of coffee, country of origin, and number of defects. For
countries such as Costa Rica, all coffee that entered the
commodity market was essentially priced the same.
This meant that the best way to maximize coffee
income for the country was to increase the production
of adequate coffee. The Costa Rican government inter-
vened extensively to encourage production at more
Culture, Agriculture, Food and Environment
productive lower elevations, even though that coffee is
also lower in quality. In addition, coffee perceived to
be of excellent quality, like that produced in Tarraz
u,
was mixed with lower quality coffee produced in other
areas. This ensured that as much “adequate” coffee
could make it to the international market as possible.
On the international market, quality was generally
measured only in technical terms: Exportable coffee
must only have a small number of “defects,” such as
beans which are damaged or unripe. Coffee varieties
were developed using productivity per hectare as the
main consideration, with resistance to disease—as dis-
eased beans were a defect—an important secondary
factor. Flavor was not an important concern, as it was
not measured in any formal sense.
This system of production largely effaced local
qualities and characteristics from Costa Rican coffee.
Everyone was encouraged to grow a few varieties of
highly productive coffee, which were then processed
together in batches that mixed coffee from different ele-
vations and different microclimates. After processing,
and national level, in a very successful attempt to cre-
ate a single typical Costa Rican coffee—a clean
balanced cup that was consistently good. That coffee
did quite well in the pre-1970s commodity market,
winning a premium of a few cents above the world
market price. However, it did it by rendering more
specific identifications mute (Sand
ı Morales, Rivera,
and Mora 2007; Sick 1999; Topik and Samper 2006).
This system of processing created the twentieth-
century coffee landscape of Costa Rica, which focused
on the facilities that move coffee to market rather than
the farms itself. Large coffee processing plants, called
beneficios, are generally placed near streams on the edge
of central towns. Each beneficio combines coffee from
hundreds or thousands of farms, with the largest ben-
eficios processing millions of pounds of coffee a year.
Coffee is rarely delivered directly to the beneficio.
Instead, each afternoon, farmers deliver the coffee cher-
ries picked that day to a recibidor, a small shed that
serves as receiving facilities for a single beneficio. Reci-
bidores from competing beneficios are generally
grouped close together. At each recibidor, coffee from
multiple farms is mixed. At the beneficio, coffee beans
from different areas are mixed further as they are
soaked and run through mechanical scrubbers to
remove the skin and pulp of the cherry. Coffee batches
are further combined as beans are dried on patios and
in forced air-drying in large machines; batches by this
2
time contain tens or even hundreds of thousands of
pounds of beans. This style of processing produces a
uniformly flavored coffee by combining coffee beans
with different flavor profiles.
Specialty Coffee Markets and the Costa Rican
Coffee Landscape
The rise of the specialty coffee market created new
production incentives, developing the concept of ter-
roir in coffee and emphasizing local landscapes. Buyers
such as Starbucks were willing to pay much higher
prices for “quality” coffee. Quality in coffee is a compli-
cated idea, partially based on lack of defects, partially
based on how the coffee tastes, and partially based on
certification systems such as Fair Trade or Rainforest
Alliance. Quality in the specialty coffee market
involved paying attention to a set of features which
could be and indeed had to be mapped on the land-
scape—country of origin, named geographical regions
within it, and elevation at which the coffee was grown.
Minimally, specialty coffee is coffee with essen-
tially no defects of flavor or defective beans. To
produce this outcome, coffee must be carefully har-
vested, as unripe and overripe beans are defects, as are
beans damaged by fungal diseases or by poor han-
dling. It must be processed carefully to remove the
defective beans that sneak through. Additionally, the
coffee should have an attractive flavor profile; the Spe-
cialty Coffee Association of America (SCAA 2015b)
defines specialty coffee as coffee that has a rating of at
least 80 on a 100-point scale that includes various mea-
sures of aroma and flavor. Third Wave coffee roasters,
a name referring to those smaller roasters whose aes-
thetic for coffee was shaped in response to Starbucks’
dominance and who currently pay the highest prices,
go further. They focus not only on a lack of defects and
generic quality, but also on coffee that has distinctive
flavor, often in a flavor profile associated with a speci-
fic regional terroir. That some features of that flavor
profile depend on the dominant varieties of coffee and
local processing systems, rather than with the details of
soil and weather, is certainly clear, although often
ignored in the rhetoric of terroir. The features that form
the typical taste of Tarraz
u coffee are discussed in more
detail below.
In wine, terroir is used to talk not only about large
named regions such as Burgundy, Bordeaux, and Napa
but also about finer distinctions within those regions.
Farmers even use the idea of terroir to talk about
Culture, Agriculture, Food and Environment
differences between individual fields on their farm
(Black and Ulin 2013). However, it has spread far
beyond that, to tea (Besky 2014), tequila (Bowen 2015),
olive oil (Meneley 2007), and cheese (Paxson 2012)
among many other products. The discourse of terroir is
also used to talk about agricultural practice. Sometimes
it is tied to legally defined areas and other times to a
broad assertion by artisanal producers that a particular
place is special. In theory, terroir is tied to models of tra-
ditional cultural livelihoods; in practice, terroir has often
been used to justify innovation and change (Daynes
2013). Legal definitions of terroir have even been used
by industrial producers of tequila and mescal to exclude
traditional artisanal production (Bowen 2015).
Over the past few decades, the coffee market has
significantly changed how roasters, consumers, and
producers look at coffee landscapes. The idea of coffee
terroir has spread beyond broad named areas (Rose-
berry 1996) to a much more nuanced view of
individual places on the landscape, including individ-
ual farms and even fields within them. Paying
attention to the details of the coffee-producing land-
scape, and its relationship to production, has suddenly
become important and lucrative to coffee producers
and buyers alike. This is especially true in regions that
began with a reputation for quality, like the region of
Costa Rica known as Tarraz
u. In that market, a
nuanced view of coffee landscapes quite literally pays.
This is a market, as a 2008 review (quoted in Manzo
2010) says, “where beans are sourced from farms
instead of countries, roasting is about bringing out
rather than incinerating the unique characteristics of
each bean, and the flavor is clean and hard and pure.”
People who can or will interact with coffee landscapes
in greater detail—farmers who pay attention to how
small differences affect final flavor, buyers who are
willing to identify and pay for quality, and consumers
who trust the knowledge of those buyers and are will-
ing to pay for it—can produce a superior coffee. Thus,
the global coffee market has altered how farmers and
buyers alike perceive the landscape.
To illustrate the role of terroir in evaluating coffee,
the SCAA standards say explicitly that “coffees
expected to be high in Acidity [sic], such as a Kenya
coffee, or coffees expected to be low in Acidity [sic],
such as a Sumatra coffee, can receive equally high pref-
erence scores although their intensity rankings will be
quite different” (SCAA 2015a). Similarly, Sumatran
and Mexican coffees are contrasted as having very dif-
ferent expected characteristics for body. In practice,
3
current tastes in the high-end specialty coffee market
reward coffee with some distinctive flavor over a gen-
erally balanced cup, which can be dismissed as
“boring.” Producers are aware of this; a Tarraz
u pro-
ducer said that everyone is looking for a coffee that
“sabe de algo” (tastes like something). This coffee
should have a strong flavor; it may be chocolaty,
earthy, or floral, but it should be distinctive.
Producing coffee that has a distinctive flavor
requires an increasingly detailed focus on place. In cof-
fee, the beginning of the idea of place tied to a
particular flavor profile began with the branding of
Colombian coffee with “Juan Valdez,” in the 1950s
(Kotler and Gertner 2002). In the same time frame, a
few specific named locations, notably Hawaii’s Kona
and Jamaica’s Blue Mountain, came to be recognized as
quality coffee. These named areas came to be identified
with quality, although as with Costa Rican coffee at the
same time they were often used to “improve” adequate
coffee. Large amounts of Kona coffee, for example,
ended up in Kona blends which were only 10 percent
Kona coffee, with the remaining 90 percent made up of
undistinguished Central American coffee; however,
they could be sold under the Kona name (Kinro 2003,
108–10). The Tarraz
u regional name emerged during
the same time: In 1950, coffee from Tarraz
u was
described as “the very finest of the crop” in a Tea and
Coffee Trade Journal article. As the specialty coffee mar-
ket emerged, coffee from these regions began to receive
higher prices.
Over time, still smaller identities began to be
important: In 1989, a California Magazine profile of a
coffee roaster describes La Minita, an individual farm
along the edge of the Tarraz
u region as “the latest
superstar coffee” (Hunevan 1989). This reflects the
finely tuned awareness of space typical of Third Wave
coffee roasters. Coffee which could be precisely located
on the landscape in terms of the elevation at which it
was grown, the farm from which it came, and the vari-
ety of coffee grown was suddenly potentially far more
lucrative. Nuanced local identifications became legible
to a larger world and became increasingly important
not only to outsiders, but to locals as well. Third Wave
coffee roasters emphasize their explorations of that
same landscape, seeking out exceptional coffee from
around the world (Cycon 2007; Weissman 2011).
Coffee landscapes, at least in Coffea arabica-produ-
cing zones such as Costa Rica, consist of a variety of
microzones. Coffee thrives in the tropics, usually
between 3,000 and 6,500 ft (900–2,000 m). It requires a
Culture, Agriculture, Food and Environment
pronounced rainy and dry season, but is relatively tol-
erant of a wide range of rainfall. In general, higher
elevations produce higher quality coffee, as the beans
mature more slowly and are less likely to be damaged
by disease and pests. C. arabica is grown mostly on
slopes and in high mountain valleys. In these areas,
small distances separate areas that are substantially dif-
ferent in their physical and climatic characteristics.
The story of Panama’s La Esmeralda Geisha Spe-
cial illustrates how attention to the details of the coffee
landscape—to terroir on the small scale—can produce
truly exceptional coffee. This coffee was declared the
best coffee in the world three years running (2005,
2006, 2007) by the Specialty Coffee Association of
America; one judge stated that it was like “God in a
cup” (Weissman 2011). In the last of those years, 2007,
a lot sold for $130/lb; a later lot sold for over $300/lb
(Hacienda la Esmeralda 2014). In the early 2000s, as the
owner of Finca La Esmeralda tells the story:
it occurred to my son, Daniel, that perhaps the cup
of this farm was not due to an overall goodness,
but rather perhaps there was one area that was
producing an exceptional cup and, when mixed
together with the rest of the production, a gener-
ally ‘good’ cup resulted. He tested this notion by
cupping coffees from all over the farm. Sure
enough, there was one small valley at the high end
of the farm which produced the extraordinary cup
now known as ‘Esmeralda Special’—and which
was the coffee that sold at the extraordinary price
(Hacienda la Esmeralda 2014).
This batch of coffee would come to be identified as
a variety of coffee called Geisha, but the same variety
grew in other parts of the farm without creating the
same excellence. A unique combination of coffee vari-
ety, elevation, and other soil and climatic conditions
created an exceptional coffee. High-quality coffee can
really pay, but it requires the farmer to maintain an
intensive focus on the coffee landscape to separate
indifferent coffee from good coffee, and great coffee
from merely good coffee.
Traceability, Landscape, and Specialty Coffee
Great coffee requires more than just attention to
place, although that is critical. Farmers in Tarraz

u say
that potentially great coffee should be collected over a
short period of time as well as from a small place.
4
Microlots are units of a few hundred to a few thousand
pounds of coffee produced on a single farm or even a
small part of a farm over a short period of time. A local
co-operative combines three days of harvest from two
or three producers to make a microlot; many individ-
ual producers combine the harvest from between a few
days and a week to do the same.
These microlots are dependent on a strong system
of traceability, which clearly labels each bag of coffee
as part of a lot that comes from a particular place
and harvested at a particular point in the harvest.
This seems ironic. Traceability has generally been
seen as a key piece of the commodity trade in food
(Regattieri, Gamberi, and Manzini 2007), far removed
from the food bought and sold in the personalized
markets such as the specialty coffee markets. Trace-
ability is generally defined as a set of labeling tools
that allow a buyer, often far removed from the pro-
ducer, to identify precisely where a particular batch
of food or similar commodity came from. Thus, it
allows for quality control, often around phytosanitary
issues such as the possibility of contamination with
disease-causing bacteria (Krissoff et al. 2004). It also
allows for certification of food as organic, Fair Trade,
and the like, even when the buyer has no personal
knowledge of how the food was produced (Coff et al.
2008).
Discussions of traceability in coffee have generally
focused either on commodity coffee or on Fair Trade cof-
fee (see, e.g., Levy, Reinecke, and Manning 2016;
MacDonald 2007; Neilson 2008; Raynolds 2009; Reich-
man 2014). Among those writing about the Fair Trade
market, traceability has been seen as an impersonal pro-
cess, which is problematic when applied to a system in
which buyers and producers (or at least the leaders of
producer co-operatives) know one another and sales are
embedded within a network of personal relationships
built over time. This identification of traceability as part
of impersonal systems not grounded in relationships is
so strong that Laura Raynolds (2009) contrasts “partner-
ship” and “traceability” in her article “Mainstreaming
Fair Trade Coffee: From Partnership to Traceability.”
Certainly, the commodity market requires some level of
traceability. In Costa Rica, the highest grown coffee is
“Strictly Hard Bean” (SHB) or “Strictly High Grown”
(SHG); coffee grown above 1,350 m (4,400 ft) can be
defined as SHB. This coffee commands a higher price on
the market. However, to receive that price, it must be
separated from lower altitude coffee from harvest to
final sale. Similarly, coffee with organic or other
Culture, Agriculture, Food and Environment
certifications must be processed and stored separately
from coffee that is not certified.
However, within the specialty coffee market, what
Raynolds identifies as the “quality-driven” market,
traceability has come to mean something very
different; increasingly, it serves as a tool of partner-
ship-driven specialty coffee rather than something
antithetical to it. Creating small batches of coffee that
are separated from other batches through the process
of harvesting, processing, and marketing maximizes
the chances that coffee will have the distinctive flavor
rewarded in this market. A few unpublished papers
have focused on the role of similar traceability func-
tions and concerns in countries in Africa (Leung 2014;
Mumbi 2013), although they focus on moving from an
anonymous auction system toward increasing the iden-
tification of batches rather than the small batches
discussed here.
To understand how traceability is different in the
Third Wave part of the specialty market, we must
understand what is being traced and why. A microlot
is a relatively small quantity of coffee—in the Tarraz
u
region usually between 1 and 500 pounds—harvested
over a relatively short period of time in a relatively
homogeneous farm or part of a farm. After harvest, this
coffee is processed and stored separately from other
coffee in a single lot. Some microlots are distinctively
processed, using dry or combined wet and dry (re-
ferred to as “honey”) processing systems, as opposed
to the wet processing typical of this area; these systems
are described in detail below. That too must be clearly
identified. To sell coffee as a microlot, a producer or
processor must be able to identify precisely when and
where this particular coffee came from. This requires
detailed systems to track where and when the coffee
was harvested and keep it separate from all other cof-
fee through processing and storage. The idea is that
everyone involved can identify the coffee very clearly
as from a specific field on a particular farm in a named
region, produced by specific named individuals, of a
specific variety, whose date of harvest can even be
identified with a fair amount of precision. Farmers
who do this individually typically use handwritten sys-
tems, consisting of labels on the bags and a notebook;
often all the relevant information is given in both
places (in part to make it visible on the bags for visiting
buyers). Larger scale entities, such as the co-operative
involved in microlot production, use a numbering sys-
tem for lots and keep the important information
electronically. In each case, the producers and
5
processors show a prodigious memory for the location
of individual batches; when staring at a pile of sacks,
farmers identified to me which bag was from which
location without even looking at the labels. While farm-
ers who are not involved in this work are bemused by
the attention paid to the details of production, large
numbers of farmers have accepted that this kind of
recordkeeping is necessary to succeed in the high-value
market. Many are even proud of their systems for
managing the problem of separating and identifying
where each bag of coffee comes from.
Microlots whose characteristics are more closely
controlled, documented, and traced can command still
higher prices on the world market. Theoretically,
microlots create the conditions for great coffee. The
story of the Geisha Special recounted above makes it
clear why. Lots of coffee produced in a single microcli-
mate from a single variety of coffee and harvested over
a relatively limited part of the harvest are most likely
to have a single distinctive flavor that makes them
exceptional. A Geisha Special can only be produced in
a small area within a single farm.
Microclimate means more than just elevation,
although elevation remains important. Most microlots
come from a single farm or even from a single part of
a farm. Coffee farms often range across steep slopes,
varying in elevation and the direction they face. Thus,
the individual areas within a farm may have different
microclimates: different conditions of temperature,
sun exposure, and humidity that lead to slightly dif-
ferent ripening patterns and even to slightly different
coffee characteristics. One of the tricks to creating
truly exceptional microlots is to take guesses at the
different microclimates so that the farmer can harvest
and process them separately. It is to a farmer’s benefit
to separate areas out in the same way year after year,
so that once exceptional coffee is identified, it can be
reproduced. Doing that involves labeling areas of the
farm, naming places that often have not been named
or in many cases even thought of as distinct places
previously. For example, medium-sized farms include
multiple fields that are named individually. Don
Mayo includes ten different named areas, including
La Loma, El Llano (the flatland), La Ladera (the
slope), and Bellavista (Beautiful view); La Lia includes
Santa Rosa, Dragon, Santa Marta, and San Isidro.
Twenty-five years ago, Costa Rican farmers often had
separated fields, but did not name them or talk about
them as separate places. Differences in soil, such as
chemical composition and degree of erosion, can
Culture, Agriculture, Food and Environment
matter as well in creating these distinct areas that will
be the basis of microlots. While government agencies
offer to test soil conditions on farms, farmers mostly
create these small regions through intuition or trial
and error.
One reason that trial and error works well is that
exceptional coffee is not just about the microclimate,
but also about the coffee plants themselves. In Costa
Rica, traditional varieties, such as Villalobos, Villa
Sarchi, and Arabigo, were largely displaced in the mid-
20th century by two hybrid cultivars that had much
higher yields: Caturra and Catua
ı. These two hybrids
have good flavor and remain desirable. However, in
the 1990s, a new variety—Catimor, a cross between
C. canephora and C. arabica—was introduced. This vari-
ety was disease-resistant; it took several years for
producers to realize that it had an unpleasant flavor.
Any batch of coffee that includes Catimors is generally
unmarketable in the specialty coffee market.
Today, most coffee fields in Tarraz
u are planted
with an unclear grouping of hybrid short coffee
plants. In many cases, the farmer has only a vague
sense of the identity of the plants. In general, because
plants are generally replaced in an entire area at once,
a section of a farm serves as a proxy for variety, even
if the specific variety is unclear. Additionally, individ-
ually damaged or diseased plants are generally
replaced one at a time. As planting Catimor was
encouraged for several years, some fields have small
numbers of Catimor plants. Eliminating these plants is
generally necessary if a microlot is to have an excep-
tional flavor. Most Tarraz
u microlots are a mix of
Caturra and Catua
ı, which are perceived to have simi-
lar flavor; thus, separating and processing them
separately is not worth the trouble.
As the high-value market rewarded coffee that was
unusual in its flavor, traditional varieties began to be
desirable again. This process really took off with the
identification of the Geisha. Geisha is a traditional vari-
ety of coffee, introduced in the early 20th century from
East Africa to Costa Rica and Panama. As with most
traditional varieties, it had largely disappeared but sur-
vived in a few fields on small farms, where older but
still productive plants were replaced only slowly.
When it was identified at La Esmeralda about a decade
ago, it became a sensation for its exceptionally floral
and citrus flavor. From there, Geisha has been identi-
fied and planted in several farms in Tarraz
u and
elsewhere, where it commands an impressive price.
Other traditional varieties, such as Villalobos, Villa
6
Sarchi, and Arabigo, are also highly desirable, as they
are believed to produce more distinctive flavor than
the more common Caturra and Catua
ı. However, the
yields are much lower. Traditional varieties are easy to
identify in a field and to harvest and process sepa-
rately, as they are much larger plants than the hybrids.
It is worthwhile to do so, as the price for microlots con-
sisting of purely traditional varieties is higher. Some
farmers in this market are sticking with the hybrids,
which have higher yields, while others are planting tra-
ditional varieties of coffee, especially Geisha, because
they command a substantially higher market price. A
few have plots of each.
Space matters for microlots, but time matters too.
Coffee is at its best at the peak of the harvest, and sepa-
rating out earlier and later parts of the harvest isolates
the best coffee from the less good parts. Different vari-
eties of coffee may ripen at different rates as well,
changing the character of the coffee of a field with mul-
tiple varieties from week to week. One thing that is
important is harvesting only the ripest coffee. As the
traditional harvesting methods involve picking both
partially and fully ripe beans, farmers (almost all of
whom hire workers for part of the harvest) worry
about whether their workers will pick only the ripe cof-
fee. Just as with region, separating coffee by time does
not require a clear plan. Coffee must be processed as
soon as it is harvested, so the coffee from one week is
completely processed and dried before the coffee from
the next week is harvested. However, for traceability,
dates of harvest and processing must be recorded.
How much time to combine is a matter of judgment,
although it is less of an issue at the center of the har-
vest. At that time, volume and quality are at their
highest and even relatively large microlots often cover
only a few days’ harvest.
The work of producing a batch with an exceptional
flavor carries on into processing. Microbeneficios,
designed to process small lots of coffee at a time, are
critical to maintaining the separation of microlots and
hence the traceability and distinctiveness of batches of
coffee as they are processed. Microbeneficios range
greatly in the size of the lots they process. While some
small manual microbeneficios are aimed at allowing
small farmers in isolated areas to process their coffee
without losing value, the medium-sized microbenefi-
cios typically used in Tarraz
u are designed to process
quality coffee for the specialty coffee markets.
Processing coffee also involves a set of decisions
that have an impact on flavor. In Costa Rica, wet
Culture, Agriculture, Food and Environment
processing (also called washed) is the typical method
for processing. In this method, the skin and the pulp of
the coffee cherry are removed from the coffee beans by
soaking in water. As it sits in the water, the pulp fer-
ments, improving the flavor and acidity of the final
coffee. In dry processing (also called natural), the coffee
cherry is dried in the sun and then the beans are sepa-
rated from the pulp; this increases the fruitiness of the
final coffee. Each method of processing creates differ-
ent kinds of flavors that can be prized in this high-end
market, although both kinds of processing can create
off flavors if not done with care. In Tarraz
u, “honey”
processing, which combines features of wet and dry
processing, is in use as well. In it, the wet process
begins, but some amount of pulp is left on the beans.
The beans are then dried with the pulp on them, as in
the dry processing method. If done right, this produces
coffee that has the fruitiness of dry processing and the
brightness of wet processing.
This variety of choices that can be made around
separating and labeling regions in coffee fields, chang-
ing the varieties of coffee grown, and processing the
coffee reward the farmer who processes his or her own
coffee. Farmers who come to understand what the mar-
ket rewards and seek to find and create exceptional
coffee on their own are further rewarded. Building rela-
tionships and developing the ability to talk to buyers
about their coffee and what is exceptional about it is
rewarded still more.
Microlots may be sold through several mecha-
nisms, but all involve close personal interactions:
sometimes directly between farmer/processor and
buyer, sometimes mediated through an intermediary.
In the Tarraz
u region, that intermediary may be one
of a few middlemen who collect coffee from a group
of farmers and create a single tasting room where
English is spoken. Roasters visit the tasting room and
then are escorted to meet farmers and tour farms.
Alternately that intermediary may be an international
competition such as the Cup of Excellence, which cre-
ates settings for farmers and roasters (who serve as
judges and buyers) to interact (ACE 2015). Most pro-
ducers of microlots in Tarraz
u want to maintain all of
these types of relationships; they value existing rela-
tionships that are dependable from year to year, but
also want to constantly seek new relationships and
international attention that is hard to achieve without
the help of outsiders. Within this system, traceability
is key. The system of traceable microlots allows sellers
and buyers to identify batches that are likely to be
7
similar in flavor both within a harvest and from har-
vest to harvest.
Conclusion
The way in which the information collected by
farmers and processors and shared with roasters is
passed on to consumers continues to signal the distinc-
tive nature of specialty coffee and its relationship with
terroir. Some of these signals are simply cosmetic;
labeling coffees as being from a particular field within
a farm that consumers have probably never heard of
does not say anything in particular about the likely fla-
vor. However, it does say emphatically that the coffee
is terroir coffee—not just tied to a region, but to a par-
ticular place. It is also traceable, produced in microlots,
and therefore, a coffee that can be expected to be some-
thing special. Labels that refer to individual farms and
beneficios are becoming more common in the high-end
coffee market. Such labels include Don Mayo, Can-
delilla, and La Lia, all small-scale producers of
specialty coffee in the Tarraz
u region. The names of the
owners of these farms—Hector Bonilla, Hector San-
chez, and Alberto Monge, respectively—are used as
well. In this, coffee resembles the wine market, where
higher priced terroir wine separates itself from “table
wine” by including information about the individual
identities of named wineries and producers as well as
the regional identities of terroir-based geographical
indications. To the average consumer, these names are
mostly simply labels, as they have no real way of
knowing anything about these farms or these produc-
ers. However, coffee labeled with the names of specific
farms or farmers carries with it messages about the
kind of coffee it is and the experience that they will
have in drinking it.
The high-value coffee market has come to be
focused on small-batch coffee with distinctive taste tied
to an idea of terroir. In the process, this new market
has created new coffee landscapes—landscapes in
which farmers now think about named regions that are
culturally and even legally defined. Those who are
most successful see the different places on their farm as
meaningful labels and use those labels to show how
their attention to detail makes their coffee exceptional.
In turn, those new landscapes are used in a process—
traceability—that is more typically associated with
commodity supply chains.
This case is a reminder that terroir and traceability
are not opposed to one another but are instead
Culture, Agriculture, Food and Environment
inextricably linked. In terroir products, traceability
serves as a sign of quality. While consumers may not
use the term traceability, they expect that terroir prod-
ucts can be specifically traced back to a particular
named location. The higher the quality, the more speci-
fic the identification. In this coffee case, the connections
are clear because they are of recent vintage and still
incomplete. Some farmers produce coffee that is simply
labeled as coffee, and others’ coffee will be identified
by country or region. But highest quality and most
valuable coffee is identified as coffee from a particular
farm produced by a particular farmer.
Farmers who have succeeded in this quality coffee
market now see the characteristics of place and practice
in terms of how they contribute to terroir. Different
varieties of coffee are now seen as important not just
because they behave differently, but because they may
be rewarded differently in the market. What had previ-
ously been a single field has become an intricately
subdivided place with a set of meanings that must be
made legible and communicated to others so that
regions can be harvested separately year after year.
Along the way, the landscape and the world of farms
and food production set within them are constantly
reworked in response to changing social needs and
market demands.
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