Costa Rica
Central Valley
Natalia Gómez and Juan Ramón Alvarado
Brumas del Zurquí - El centro
Geisha
Honey
2025 - 2026
Brown Sugar, Black Cherry, Caramel, Dried Mango, Dried Orange, Floral, Grape, Green Apple, Mandarin, Orange, Milk Chocolate, Roasted Nuts
1450 meters
N/A
69 Kg W/GrainPro
USA - Oakland, CA - Annex - CTI
For four generations, the Alvarado family has dedicated itself to growing, processing, and roasting coffee in Costa Rica, continually refining its approach to produce coffees that reflect both quality and place. Today, Brumas del Zurquí combines decades of experience with a commitment to regenerative agriculture, using biological and natural fertilizers to promote healthy soils, support biodiversity, and produce coffees with clarity and consistency. This work has earned the farm recognition as a certified Regenerative Coffee producer.
Once harvested, cherries are carefully processed at the family’s wet mill, where attention to detail at every stage helps preserve the character of each lot. Over the years, Brumas del Zurquí has been recognized with multiple Cup of Excellence awards, reflecting the team’s long-term focus on quality and continuous improvement.
Finca El Centro further strengthens this legacy through the Gómez Chávez family, whose connection to coffee spans more than a century. The union of Natalia Gómez and Juan Ramón Alvarado brought together two coffee-growing families, expanding their shared vision of producing distinctive Costa Rican coffees. Today, their combined farms cultivate a range of varieties that express the diversity of the region and the experience passed down through generations.
This Geisha undergoes a Honey process that highlights both the variety’s vibrant character and the careful processing practices at Brumas del Zurquí. Harvest begins with the selective picking of fully ripe cherries, chosen only when they reach more than 20° Brix to ensure optimal sugar content. After harvest, the cherries are depulped while retaining as much mucilage as possible, allowing the remaining sugars to contribute to flavor development during drying.
The coffee is then dried on raised beds for approximately 25 days, with frequent turning to promote even drying and maintain stability throughout the process. Once the coffee reaches the target moisture content, it is hulled and prepared for export.
By preserving the mucilage during drying, the Honey process enhances sweetness and contributes to a layered cup profile while using considerably less water than fully washed processing. In this lot, the process complements the expressive nature of geisha, supporting its floral-forward character with a balanced sweetness and refined complexity.
Central Valley is where coffee cultivation began in Costa Rica in 1820 and while the area around the capital of San Jose and neighboring cities Alajuela and Heredia is mostly urbanized, there are still thriving coffee farms on the outskirts of the busy cities. Coffee was Costa Rica’s principal export crop through the nineteenth into the twentieth century.
Today pineapple, bananas, and root crops like yuca make up the bulk of the country’s exports, but coffee remains an essential part of Costa Rica’s history and nowhere more so than in the Central Valley.
The Central Valley, Valle Central in Spanish, is a plateau in central Costa Rica. The land in the valley is a relative plain surrounded by several mountains and volcanoes of the Central Range, including Volcan Irazú.
The region is home to almost three quarters of Costa Rica’s population and includes the capital and most populous city, San José. The land in the Central Valley is distributed between the provinces of Alajuela, Heredia, San José and Cartago. The region occupies an area of 11,366 km², more than a fifth of the country, and is drained by the Tárcoles River. Farms in Central Valley are comparatively accessible but recognized for growing and processing Arabica coffees with the bright acidity and complex fruit flavors Costa Rican coffee is known for.
