Anonos Honey Caturra

Marvin and Felipe Rodriguez are the owners of Anonos Farm. They are also founders of the Helsar de Zarcero micro-mill. This wet-mill was one of the first micro-mills in Costa Rica and is often credited for starting the micro-mill revolution which has become such a differentiator in the Costa Rican coffee industry. With farmers having the ability to operate their own micro-mill for processing and drying, they can acquire a higher price per pound for their coffee as they have a greater investment in infrastructure, time and quality. Not only that, they can experiment and try new innovations and techniques to push the boundaries of flavor within coffee.

This farm was certified organic for years and years until Marvin became fed up with the system in place. After receiving no support from the organic certifications and no yearly visits to ensure the practices were still being followed and met, Marvin decided to leave the certification behind. Now, he still continues to practice organic coffee farming; however, he has called his coffee 'producto limpio' or 'clean product' rather than organic. So it's not certified organic, but rather a new styling labelled as such. For many coffee producers, organic certifications are unreasonably expensive and unattainable due to these economics. This was actually our motivation to create our own internal certifications, and this offering from Anonos is the first Rosso Green to launch.

This is now the fourth season we've visited Helsar de Zarcero; however, it’s just the third year we’ve secured a lot of coffee from here. We've always been very impressed with our visits. The innovation happening here at Helsar is inspiring, and we believe they’re helping push the bounds of specialty coffee.

Helsar will process cherry for farmers who have not had the opportunity to build out their own wet mills, or nearby farmers who have relied on the Perez family for the past decade to process their cherry. Coffees will be pulped and left with some mucilage intact. After, they’ll shift out to patios where they’ll pre-dry for two or three days. Depending on the weather, the Perez family may bypass the pre-drying and instead put the coffee into a mechanical dryer for a single day. From there, the coffees will go out to African style beds which they’ve built out on a tilt – a nice innovation.

Beside the micro-mill, the Perez family has gone and built out something we have never seen before. They believe they may be one of the first in the industry to have their own Cascara processing lab. We weren’t allowed to take any photos inside the lab as it’s still being developed and still remains a bit of a secret. It’s essentially a clean and efficient way to take the coffee cherries – usually used for fertilizers – and turn them into Cascara, or coffee cherry tea.

A honey processed coffee is pulped, meaning the cherry is spliced open and the mucilage inside is exposed. Rather than cleaning it all off the seeds using water to rinse, the coffee is brought to dry covered in this mucilage. This will lead to increased sweetness with jammy or honey-like body.

For this yellow honey process, approximately half of the mucilage is left on with the coffee seeds to dry. No intentional fermentation stage occurs.