Plum Runner

At 2am, while the rest of Tarrazú is asleep, Juan Carlos and Felix Umaña are out on their mountain bikes, riding in complete darkness. They keep going until around 5:30, eat breakfast fast, change, and then go put in a full, heavy day of work on the farm. Every single day.

That's the first thing you need to know about the Umaña brothers.

The second thing is that Juan Carlos won La Ruta de los Conquistadores, a three-day, coast-to-coast mountain bike race across Costa Rica that throws pretty much every kind of terrain at you. It is absolutely brutal. He won it.

So where does that come from? Their mom. She's famous for her baking, and when the boys were kids they would load up her buns and ride them into town to sell every day. Town is 5km away and 500m lower than the house. Lovely on the way down. Then you have to ride home.

Felix, Dario and Juan Carlos are fourth generation coffee producers who grew up on the farm in Alto Canet, and their dad taught them agriculture from a young age. For generations the family grew the coffee, picked it, and delivered the cherries to the local co-op. Then in 2014 the brothers built their own micro mill and named it La Roca. Every year since, they've been learning processing and getting better at all of it, from cherry selection to de-pulping to drying.

It shows. They've finished top five in the Exclusive Coffees competition three years in a row, including first place in 2021. And what did they do with the prize money from that win? Every cent went into new de-pulping equipment. Of course it did.

Unlike a lot of producers in Costa Rica, the brothers do a big share of the manual labour on the farm themselves. That means the work gets done properly and at exactly the right time, and that's the stuff that sets them apart on the cupping table.

This lot is a Red Catuaí from their farm El Alto, at 2000m. Up there the coffee grows slowly, which gives it more time to build complexity. It surprises me on the cupping table every year, with delicate juiciness and fruit notes that manage to be complex and elegant at the same time. One of my favourite Costa Rican coffees this year.

They're some of the hardest-working people I've met in coffee, and some of the most humble. I'm proud to be sharing their coffee.