Costa Rica - Las Margaritas 26 H-17

Brew Guide:

Best Brewed with: Filter

Lightest Roaster Influence: Very well sorted and milled, we found unlike our usual approach to honey processed coffees, this lot expressed best with a very short development time - the florals are easily lost in this lot.

Best Rested: 3-4 weeks

Filter: 60g/L, 96°C when fresh but when well rested you can go down to 92-93°C

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

We’re tasting: Aromas of black tea and orange blossom. In the cup it's sweet and sticky tinned mandarin wedges, alongside pistachio and lemon nougat. As it cools there's a bright golden kiwi acidity, and hints of peach iced tea, supported by a rich background note that reminds us of amber maple syrup.

Traceability

The Story

Emmanuel Solis established Las Margaritas 26 in 2013 on former grazing land in El Cedral de Dota at elevations reaching up to 2,100 metres above sea level, at the documented upper limit of Costa Rican coffee cultivation. 

Emmanuel is a third-generation producer and named the farm after his daughter Margarita. His approach reflects a broader shift in Costa Rican speciality production where producers with cooperative heritage have moved toward independent micro-milling to control quality outcomes from harvest through to export preparation. He's cultivating a portfolio of varieties selected for cup quality rather than yield, including Geisha, SL-28, and Villalobos alongside this H-17 planting, and Emmanuel has maintained a strict no-herbicide policy since the farm's establishment whilst working to build biodiversity through native fruit tree integration.

The H-17 variety appears to originate from the CIRAD-PROMECAFE-CATIE regional genetic improvement programme that began in the early 1990s, a collaborative effort between French agricultural research institutions, Central American coffee institutes, and CATIE's germplasm collection in Turrialba. This programme produced several officially documented hybrids, though H-17's exact parentage remains somewhat ambiguous in available documentation, with most sources citing a Catuaí and Ethiopian landrace (likely Sudan Rume) cross. Sudan Rume, if indeed the Ethiopian parent, was collected from the Boma Plateau on the Ethiopia-South Sudan border in the 1940s and is genetically ancestral to Kenya's SL-28, documented for exceptional cup quality with intense floral aromatics but commercially impractical yields, making it valuable primarily as breeding stock for quality improvement programs.

What makes this lot technically interesting extends beyond its genetic background. Research on coffee biochemistry demonstrates that sucrose content increases measurably with elevation whilst caffeine and chlorogenic acids decrease, and that altitude drives higher concentrations of aldehydes (sweet, caramel aromatics) over pyrazines (roasted, nutty compounds). At 2,100 metres, the farm operates in an environment where these biochemical shifts are maximised, and where bean density increases substantially compared to lower elevations. 

We saw a tension in this coffee - it tasted to us like a blend of a super nice Catuaí (Panama esq) with an Ethiopian coffee, and so offered many possible routes for brewing. We selected it for the UK independent filter championships because we were curious to see where competitors would take it. We looked for cups that combined the two with elegance without overly favouring one or the other - and in terms of divining the evaluation and brewing skills of the competitors, it was perfect