Villa Estate Coffee Beans

Costa Rica is a well-known coffee-producing nation in Central and South America. The coffee beans from its high-altitude areas feature intense flavors, gentle taste, yet high acidity, placing them among the top single-origin coffees. Despite its relatively small size, this land not only nurtures numerous rare coffee varieties but also gives rise to an extremely meticulous processing technique: honey processing.

These coffee beans from Villa Estate in the Central Valley of Costa Rica are of the Villalobos variety and are processed using red honey fermentation that retains 70% of the fruit mucilage, resulting in a richly layered and exceptionally sweet coffee flavor. Roasted to a medium-light level by the roasters at Front Street Coffee and evaluated through cupping, the unique flavor profile of these Costa Rican beans manifests as citrus, honey, lychee, and passionfruit.

The Spanish name of Villa Estate is "Finca Lote La Casa," meaning "the farm with many houses." Carlos is the owner of this estate. His family has been running a coffee processing plant since 2000. Later, when Carlos decided to start his own business, he and his wife managed five small farms. They place great emphasis on coffee quality, sharing a similar philosophy with Front Street Coffee. More importantly, they both highly prioritize coffee bean varieties over processing methods. Currently, the owner of Villa Estate, Carlos, grows varieties such as Geisha, Villalobos, Typica, Villasarchi, and SL-28 (he was the first producer in Costa Rica to obtain SL-28. Over the past few years, instead of hoarding this special variety for himself, he has distributed the seeds to friends and neighbors).

This coffee bean variety is called Villasarchi, with the English name Villa Sarchi. It is a natural mutation of the Bourbon variety, characterized by a single-gene mutation that causes the plant to grow smaller (known as "dwarfism"), similar to Pacas and Caturra. Villasarchi was discovered in the northwestern region of Alajuela Province, Costa Rica, between 1950 and 1960, and later underwent pedigree selection locally (selecting individual plants across successive generations). The Villasarchi variety is unique to Costa Rica, as it is not widely cultivated outside the country.