Costa Rica

Costa Rica is a small origin that decided to compete on quality because it could never compete on quantity. It produced about 78,822 tonnes of coffee in 2023 on United Nations agricultural data — roughly 1.3 million sixty-kilogram bags, which puts it nineteenth in the world.¹ That is under 1% of global output,² about an eighth of what Honduras grows next door, and a rounding error beside Brazil.

What it has instead is a two-century head start, a regulator with statutory power over the whole chain, and a competition record that includes some of the highest cupping scores published anywhere.

World rank	19th (2023)1
Volume	78,822 t ≈ 1.3 million 60 kg bags (2023)1
Share of world output	under 1%2
National body	ICAFE (Instituto del Café de Costa Rica), founded 1933
Origin brand	Café de Costa Rica, ICAFE’s own certification and traceability programme3
Species	Arabica only, in practice
Dominant varieties	Caturra and Catuaí4
Premium altitude band	1,200–1,700 m2
Grading	by altitude; SHB (Strictly Hard Bean) is the top rung
Competition	Cup of Excellence Costa Rica, three categories
Record auction price	$300.09/lb — honey-process Geisha, 2018

How coffee got there, and how fast it took over

Photo: public domain. Source.

The early dates are contested (see the callout below), but the economic story is not. Coffee arrived in the Central Valley — the Meseta Central — in the late 1700s, spread through government encouragement in the first decades of the 1800s, and by 1829 had already passed cacao, tobacco and sugar to become the country’s leading export.² It held that position for well over a century. By 2006 it had slipped to Costa Rica’s number three export.²

The route to market was indirect at first. From 1832, coffee went to Chile, where merchants re-bagged it and shipped it on to London as “Café Chileno de Valparaíso” — Costa Rican coffee sold under a Chilean name.²⁴ Costa Rican accounts push the first shipment earlier still: on 12 October 1820 the ship Nuestra Señora is recorded carrying the first quintal of “Café de Costa Rica” from Puntarenas to Perico, Panama.⁴

Direct trade with Britain began in 1843, when the Guernsey captain William Le Lacheur shipped several hundred bags to the United Kingdom aboard The Monarch.² England stayed the largest buyer of Costa Rican coffee until the Second World War, when rationing cut the demand away.²

Two names carry the promotional half of that history: Father Félix Velarde, whose 1816 will mentions a plot planted with coffee and who is named as the first known cultivator, and Mariano Montealegre, described as the principal promoter of the crop through the 1830s and 1840s.⁴

To verify — nobody agrees on when or from where coffee arrived

The three accounts behind this note contradict each other outright, and the disagreement is not minor:

• The English-language encyclopedia says production began in 1779 in the Meseta Central, with Coffea arabica sourced directly from Ethiopia rather than by the usual Arabian route.²
• The Spanish-language encyclopedia says the first seeds came from the Antilles around 1776.⁴
• Several popular histories say the beans came from Cuba in the late 1700s, and one legal-information site gives a precise episode: in 1791 Governor José Vázquez y Téllez requested seeds from the Portuguese merchant Agustín de Gana in Panama, who sent two arrobas (about 50 lb) aboard Nuestra Señora de los Ángeles to Puntarenas and onward to Cartago.⁵

Three different decades and three different source regions. The 1791 episode is presented as narrative on a commercial legal site with no archival citation, and the “directly from Ethiopia” claim is unusual enough that it should not be repeated without a primary source. State no introduction date as fact from this note. The same research also attributes to secondary sources a 1808 land-grant policy under Governor Tomás de Acosta, about 17,000 coffee trees by 1821, an 1825 tax exemption and an 1831 decree granting title to anyone who planted and worked fallow land for five years — all plausible, none verified at a primary source.⁵

The seven-or-eight regions

Costa Rica’s whole marketing strategy is to be read as a set of named places rather than one country, the same move Brazil made with Cerrado Mineiro. The regions that appear on bags:

Region	Note
Tarrazú / Los Santos	The famous one; a market name in its own right, 1,200–1,900 m
Valle Central (Central Valley)	Where coffee started; home of Hacienda Sonora
Valle Occidental (West Valley)	The other Central Valley half, and Villa Sarchi’s home ground
Tres Ríos	Small, high, near San José
Orosi	Cartago province
Turrialba	Lower and wetter; also where CATIE keeps its germplasm collection
Guanacaste	The dry north-west
Brunca	The southern zone, including Coto Brus and Pérez Zeledón

That is eight names, and the count is genuinely unsettled — see the callout below.

To verify — seven regions or eight

ICAFE’s own origin-brand site says “seven regions, one origin” and does not name them.³ The English-language encyclopedia names the eight listed above,² and a trade profile quoting ICAFE’s quality director is reported to say eight as well, adding that the regional concept launched in 1988 and that ICAFE began issuing per-region denominations of origin from 2000. The ICAFE note already carries this conflict unresolved. The eight names above are the ones in commercial circulation; the official count is what ICAFE’s site says, and it says seven. Do not quote a region count as regulation.

What the auctions actually show

The research behind this note claimed there was no verifiable Costa Rican competition data. That is wrong — the Alliance for Coffee Excellence publishes full results tables, and they are among the most interesting in the programme.

Costa Rica judges in three categories: Traditional Washed, Traditional Honey & Natural, and an Experimental category. Winning lots score 87+, National Winners 85+, and every winner is cupped at least five times.⁶

	Year	Category	Farm	Producer	Variety / process	Score	Top price
1	2024	Honey & Natural	Don Cayito	Luis Ricardo Calderón Madrigal	Geisha, Tarrazú	93.62	82.30/lb (1A), 80.10/lb (1B)6
2	2024	Traditional Washed	Santa Teresa	Roger Ureña Hidalgo	Washed Geisha, Tarrazú	92.04	83.00/lb (1A), **84.00/lb** (1B)6
3	2024	Experimental	Finca Voo	Café Solís & Cordero S.A.	Catuaí, Tarrazú	91.19	— 6
4	2025	Honey & Natural	La Cusuka	Jhonny Alvarado Fonseca	Natural Geisha, Pérez Zeledón	91.22	$91.00/lb (1A)7
5	2025	Traditional Washed	Vista Paraíso	Jhon Alvarado Abarca	Geisha, Pérez Zeledón	90.63	$80.30/lb (1A)7
6	2025	Experimental	Finca Voo	Café Solís & Cordero S.A.	Catuaí, Los Santos	90.47	$70.10/lb (1B)7

Whole-auction figures: 2024 moved 26 COE lots for 673,019.61**, a weighted average of **26.82/lb; 2025 moved 30 lots (ten per category) and 22,751.62 lb for 700,062.72**, averaging **30.76/lb.⁶⁷

Three things stand out.

Don Cayito’s 93.62 is extraordinary. It is higher than every score in this wiki’s Cup of Excellence records by country ledger — higher than the 93.36 Bolivian lot from 2009, and nearly three points above the Ethiopian coffee that holds the all-time COE price record. And it sold for $82.30 a pound, about a fifth of that Ethiopian lot’s price. Costa Rica cups at the very top of the programme and does not get paid like it. See Premiumisation.

Honey and natural processing wins here. In both years the highest-scoring coffee in the country came out of the honey-and-natural category, not the washed one — and the country’s all-time price record, $300.09/lb in 2018, was a honey-process Geisha too. For an origin whose reputation was built on clean washed coffee, that is a real shift. Details and the unresolved questions about the 2018 lot are on Cup of Excellence records by country.

The map is moving south. Every 2024 category winner came from Tarrazú. In 2025 both traditional categories were won from Pérez Zeledón, in the southern Brunca zone — the same general area as Coto Brus, which this wiki describes as having no competition record at all. One good year does not redraw an origin, but it is the first hard evidence in this wiki of top-scoring Costa Rican coffee from outside Los Santos and the Central Valley.

The buyers are the familiar global cohort: Angelino’s Coffee, Orsir International, Kaldi Coffee Farm / Camel Coffee, Black Knight, and a long tail of Chinese, Hong Kong and Korean importers.⁶⁷

Varieties, processing and grading

The planted stock is narrow by Central American standards. Caturra and Catuaí — both compact, high-yielding Bourbon-family selections — dominate, and both are chosen for being cheap to pick on steep ground rather than for exotic flavour.⁴ Costa Rica also gave the world Villa Sarchi, the dwarf Bourbon mutation found in the West Valley that became the parent of the whole Sarchimor family, and ICAFE bred Costa Rica 95, a Catimor whose rust resistance did not hold. Typica Mejorada shows up in microlots, and Geisha now wins the auctions.

Processing is where Costa Rica genuinely leads. The country is the reference origin for honey processing — the fruit skin is stripped off but the sticky mucilage is left on the bean while it dries, a middle road between washed and natural that adds sweetness and body. Yellow, red and black honeys describe how much mucilage was kept and how slowly the lot dried. That vocabulary spread from Costa Rican micromills: small on-farm processing works that let individual families stop selling anonymous cherry into a co-op blend. See Pulped natural for the Brazilian ancestor of the method.

Grading is by altitude, not bean size or defect count, which is the Central American convention. SHB — Strictly Hard Bean — is the top rung, and it describes how dense the bean is because of how high and slowly it grew, not how good it tastes. Premium coffee generally comes from 1,200 to 1,700 metres,² with Tarrazú running to 1,900 m.

To verify — the harvest calendar, and whether Robusta is legal

• Harvest months are unsettled across sources. The research report gives December to April; the English-language encyclopedia says months vary by region and span June through March; the Tarrazú note carries a USDA-attributed national window of November to February, stretching from August in low southern zones to May at the highest altitudes.² Those three do not reconcile. The safe statement is that picking runs through the northern-hemisphere winter and starts earlier at low altitude.
• The Spanish-language encyclopedia says that “up to February 2018, 100% of coffee was Arabica, of the Caturra and Catuaí varieties.”⁴ That phrasing implies something changed in February 2018 — Costa Rica is widely said to have prohibited Robusta cultivation and then permitted it — but no statute, decree or ICAFE resolution was read here, and the source does not explain its own cut-off date. Do not state a Robusta ban, or its repeal, as law from this note. In practice Costa Rica’s specialty exports are Arabica.
• The same encyclopedia entry gives no room for the small experimental plantings of SL28, Geisha and other varieties that the auction tables above prove exist, so read its “100%” as a claim about the commercial bulk crop, not the whole country.

Protected origin — the part that is not established

Café de Costa Rica is ICAFE’s origin programme, and it is real and readable: the site describes itself as the country’s official coffee certification and traceability initiative, backed by ICAFE and supported by Law 2762, with QR-code traceability down to the lot, a low-emissions coffee seal, and EUDR deforestation-compliance work.³

The legal protection is where the wiki has to be careful.

To verify — the IGP and the Tarrazú denomination of origin

The Spanish-language encyclopedia states that Costa Rican coffee is protected under an Indicación Geográfica Protegida (IGP) covering all national production, and that Tarrazú carries an additional Denominación de Origen Protegida (DOP) covering its name specifically.⁴

This wiki already flags the Tarrazú protection as unverified. The Tarrazú note records a separate trade-press claim that Tarrazú received PDO status in 2019, with protection extending to 180-plus countries — and notes that the source names no granting authority, no registration number and no legal instrument. Two secondary sources asserting a protection is not the same as a registry entry. Costa Rica’s denominations of origin sit with the Registro Nacional, and nothing from it has been consulted for either note. Compare Huila, where the Colombian regulator’s resolution numbers are on the record.

Until a Costa Rican registry document or an ICAFE resolution is read, “Costa Rican coffee is a protected geographical indication” is a reported claim on this wiki, not a fact.

Who grows it, and who picks it

Costa Rica is smallholder country. About 70% of its coffee-farming population are smallholders, typically working under ten hectares each, and they sell through cooperatives and micromills rather than directly — which is the whole reason ICAFE exists. Its founding problem in 1933 was producers being squeezed by the mills that processed their cherry, and its answer, still in force, is a statutory minimum price that mills must pay. Two cooperatives in this wiki show what that structure looks like on the ground: Coopedota in Santa María de Dota, credited with the world’s first carbon-neutral coffee in 2011, and Coopesabalito in Coto Brus, which mills, roasts, and also runs the local supermarket and fuel station.

The harvest itself runs on migrant labour. Indigenous Ngäbe-Buglé families travel up from western Panama each season and chain several harvests together as the cherry ripens — Coto Brus first, then Los Santos, then the Central Valley. The Casas de la Alegría childcare houses exist because of that migration. A country that sells traceability to the lot has its coffee picked, at the first stop, by people who crossed a border to do it.

Why it matters

It is the clearest case of a small origin buying its way out of the commodity market. Nineteenth in the world by volume, under 1% of global production, and yet its name carries a premium that much larger origins cannot get. The instruments are all institutional: a ninety-year-old regulator with a price floor, a national origin brand with lot-level traceability, region names sold as separate products, and a competition that publishes scores and prices every year.

And it shows the limit of that strategy. A 93.62-point coffee sold for 82.30 a pound** in 2024. The 2018 record of **300.09/lb was, at the time, nearly triple the standing COE high — and it has since been beaten more than fivefold by Ethiopia. Quality is necessary here and it is clearly present. It is not sufficient. What sets the ceiling is which origins buyers have already decided to bid on. See Premiumisation.

The pressure is at the bottom, not the top. Coto Brus has lost roughly half its production in fifteen years to disease and erratic flowering, and Climate change and coffee projects the growing zone moving uphill and away from the mid-altitude farms that make up most of the country’s producers. The auction tables above describe a few hundred pounds of coffee. The decline describes the rest of it.

Related

• ICAFE — the non-state public institute that regulates, breeds for, price-floors and markets Costa Rican coffee
• Tarrazú · Coto Brus · Hacienda Sonora — the regions and farms this wiki already documents
• CATIE — the international research institute at Turrialba, and its 1949 germplasm collection
• Cup of Excellence · Cup of Excellence records by country · Alliance for Coffee Excellence — the competition, and where Costa Rica’s $300.09/lb record sits
• Honey process · Washed process · Natural process · Pulped natural — the processing spectrum Costa Rica is the reference origin for
• Caturra · Catuaí · Villa Sarchi · Sarchimor · Costa Rica 95 · Catimor · Typica Mejorada · Geisha — what is planted here, and what ICAFE bred
• Honduras · Guatemala · Nicaragua · Panama · El Salvador — the neighbours, and the volume comparison
• IHCAFE · ANACAFÉ · PROCAFE — ICAFE’s counterparts and co-breeders in the Central American consortium
• Coopedota · Coopesabalito · Producer cooperatives — how smallholders reach a mill
• Ngäbe-Buglé coffee labour · Casas de la Alegría · Selective picking — who actually harvests the crop
• Carbon-negative coffee — Coopedota’s 2011 certification, and the limits on it
• Coffee leaf rust · Climate change and coffee — the two pressures on the mid-altitude majority
• Chorreador — how Costa Rica drinks its own coffee
• Premiumisation · C-market — why a 93-point coffee here fetches a fraction of a 90-point coffee elsewhere
• Hidenori Izaki — won the 2014 World Barista Championship on Tarrazú coffee
• Angelino’s Coffee · Orsir Coffee · Peet’s Coffee — buyers named in the auction tables and sourcing relationships above
• Cerrado Mineiro · Sidama · Huila — other origin-branding projects, and the evidence standard to hold this one to

Official links

• Official site — Café de Costa Rica (ICAFE’s origin brand) — confirmed as ICAFE’s own origin-brand and traceability site
• Official site — ICAFE (Instituto del Café de Costa Rica) — the regulator (TLS certificate error when checked previously; not read for this note)
• Official results — Alliance for Coffee Excellence, Cup of Excellence Costa Rica 2025
• Official results — Alliance for Coffee Excellence, Cup of Excellence Costa Rica 2024

Footnotes

1. List of countries by coffee production (FAO data for 2023) — Wikipedia — confirmed via WebFetch; source of the 78,822 tonnes and the 19th-place ranking. The 60 kg bag figure is arithmetic from the tonnage, not a published number ↩ ↩² ↩³

2. Coffee production in Costa Rica — Wikipedia — confirmed via WebFetch; source of the 1829 rise above cacao, tobacco and sugar, the number-three position by 2006, the 1832 Chile route and “Café Chileno de Valparaíso”, William Le Lacheur and The Monarch in 1843, the sub-1% share, the eight named regions, the 1,200–1,700 m band, the 1779/Ethiopia introduction claim and the June–March harvest span ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹²

3. Café de Costa Rica — ICAFE origin brand — confirmed via WebFetch; source of the “seven regions, one origin” framing, Law 2762 backing, QR-code traceability, the low-emissions seal and the EUDR compliance work ↩ ↩² ↩³

4. Café de Costa Rica — Wikipedia (Spanish) — confirmed via WebFetch; source of the IGP and Tarrazú DOP claims, the 1776 Antilles seeds, Father Félix Velarde’s 1816 will, the 12 October 1820 first quintal to Perico, Jorge Stiepel’s 1832 Chile export, Mariano Montealegre, and the “100% Arabica, Caturra and Catuaí up to February 2018” statement ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸

5. The History of Coffee in Costa Rica: A Brew That Shaped a Nation — CostaRicaLaw.com — commercial legal-information site; source of the 1791 Vázquez y Téllez episode and the early land and tax policies, none of it archivally cited or verified here ↩ ↩²

6. Alliance for Coffee Excellence — Cup of Excellence Costa Rica 2024 results and auction — confirmed via WebFetch; source of the three-category structure, the 87+/85+ thresholds, Don Cayito’s 93.62 and its lot prices and buyers, Santa Teresa’s 92.04 and 84.00/lb, Finca Voo's 91.19, and the 673,019.61 / $26.82/lb auction totals ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶

7. Alliance for Coffee Excellence — Cup of Excellence Costa Rica 2025 results and auction — confirmed via WebFetch; source of the 26–30 May 2025 jury week, the 8 July 2025 auction, La Cusuka at 91.22 and 91.00/lb, Vista Paraíso at 90.63 and 80.30/lb, Finca Voo at 90.47, and the 30 lots / 22,751.62 lb / 700,062.72 / 30.76/lb totals ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵