[122] Costa Rica - Aromas del Chirripó "Los Alpes" Mibirizi [CROP 24/25 ARCHIVE]

We're coming to the end of our late arrival Costa Rican lots, where as you might now guess this season's theme has been interesting cultivar exploration. This coffee comes from the Aromas del Chirripó wet mill and their farm Finca Los Alpes on the slopes of the Chirripó volcano, in that region we've come to very much love in Costa Rica - Brunca.

The Mibirizi variety is nearly always associated with old-stock production in Rwanda - having been first taken there for the establishment of colonial coffee production in 1910. Although supplanted by later varieties (with some limited production still occurring, oft relabelled), it has excellent quality potential at altitude, and thanks to the work of CATIE producers in Costa Rica have access to this variety, which is incredibly rare to find outside of Rwanda. 

Brew Guide:

Best Brewed with: Filter

Lightest Roaster Influence: We found this coffee responded better to being roasted more like a Rwandan/East African natural than it did the sort of approach we'd apply for C. Am. Faster overall roast with more heat application, and a super short development.

Best Rested: 3-4 weeks

Filter: 62g/L, 94°C when fresh but when well rested you can go down to 91-92°C and maybe 64g/L

Espresso: 18g/48g/20-22s. Brilliant turbo/soup.

We’re tasting: Big baked peach, brown sugar and bruised strawberry aromas. In the cup it's got the cakelike sweetness of blueberry muffin including the crumble top, pomegranate molasses, dried figs, and assam tea. As it cools the jammy berry + stonefruit notes evolve alongside a clear baking spice note, reminding us of spiced plum jam

Traceability

The Story

Aromas del Chirripo is a family wet mill established in 2021 by the Acuña family in Buena Vista de Rivas, within the Chirripo micro-region of Brunca. Don Wilfrido manages cultivation whilst his sons Gerald and Wayner Acuña operate the wet mill and coordinate production, with support from their mother and sister across farm and mill operations. Their Los Alpes farm sits between 1500 and 1900 metres at the foot of Cerro Chirripo, Costa Rica's tallest peak.

In a classic example of the micromill revolution, the family transitioned from selling cherry to third-party processors to establishing their own wet processing infrastructure, using Corazón de Jesús for dry milling rather than investing in complete vertical integration.

We thought this lot was particularly interesting and rare - Mibirizi was first known as "Guatemala", and was the founding cultivar used in Rwandan coffee production during the German Colonial era (circa 1910). Thought to be a Bourbon-Typica hybrid, it's got some exceptional quality potential at altitude, but there's almost no documented wide-scale commercial cultivation outside of East Africa. Like many of the interesting cultivars and landraces we find growing in Costa Rica, the producers at Aromas del Chirripó accessed the variety through CATIE (Centro Agronómico Tropical de Investigación y Enseñanza), which maintains approximately 2,000 coffee accessions at Turrialba, and is a major international genebank for coffee agronomy.

CATIE serves as the only designated "Origin Collection" outside Africa and is the sole coffee genebank participating in the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture under Article 15, which establishes facilitated access arrangements for genetic material. This institutional framework is what enables Costa Rican producers to cultivate Ethiopian landraces, older "heirloom" cultivars, regionally specific landraces, and field-sampled varieties that would otherwise remain confined to their places of origin, alongside experimental hybrids developed by both CATIE and World Coffee Research.

Whilst nearly all Rwandan production is labelled "Red Bourbon" (thanks to a legal mandate to grow that variety by the NAEB board, although RAB15 has also recently been introduced as a disease resistant hybrid), there is still to this day cultivation of Mibirizi, alongside Jackson and Bourbon Mayaguez - but with the costs of genetic identification prohibitively expensive nor offering no additional value to the smallholders who grow it - it's very very common to see these trees labelled "Bourbon".

Super interesting - we're finding a great combination of the sort of flavours you'd find in a Rwandan coffee (stonefruit, black tea, baking spice) but the processing character of a Central American natural. Hopefully this lot will line up with our first Rwandan natties for our favourite offer exercise of presenting lots to compare and contrast the effects of genetics, processing, and environment on the final cup character.