Costa Rica - El Llano

Tarrazú lies in the high mountains south of San José, on the Pacific side of Costa Rica's central spine. Locals call it the Zona de Los Santos for the string of towns carrying San or Santa in their names. Volcanic soil, steep ground, and roughly 2,400 millimeters of rain a year across a seven-month wet season make for some of the best terroir in Central America, and some of the most intensively planted ground. Between the coffee rows, smallholders grow bananas, avocado, and citrus on land that has passed between generations, and many farms still hold stands of primary forest and shade trees over the springs that surface on the hillsides.

The Navarro Ceciliano family has been farming coffee in Los Santos for more than a hundred years. What began as traditional coffee farming has been handed down, added to, and gradually reshaped by each generation into a quality project. The family manages farms spread between 1,350 and 1,900 meters across the region, which gives them several distinct microclimates to work with and the freedom to treat each parcel on its own terms rather than pooling everything into one profile.

In 2016 they formalized that work as Inversiones Coffee Nace S.A. and built their own micromill. The name folds together the two family surnames, Navarro and Ceciliano, and doubles as the Spanish word nace, meaning "is born." Owning the mill is what makes a lot like this one possible. It lets the family decide when cherry gets picked, how it gets sorted, how long it sits on the beds, and which farms stay separate all the way through, rather than handing that judgment to someone else's processing schedule.