FESTIVE BREW | Rita Herrera Aquilera | | Costa Rica

More about Doña Rita:

Traceability information: courtesy of Falcon Coffees & Bean Voyage

Doña Rita’s story in coffee begins four generations ago, when her family began producing coffee. For this reason, she even says that their passion for coffee runs in their blood. Doña Rita’s father was passionate about growing coffee, having inherited a small piece of land from his parents. With a great deal of sacrifice, effort, and hard work for all the family, he slowly acquired more land. In Doña Rita’s view, coffee was fundamental in her family being able to move forward. The harvest was always sold to traditional mills, which made it hard to sustain as a model. Then, in 2019, Doña Rita came to know of Bean Voyage, and has been training with them and starting a new phase of her journey in coffee, learning how to process her own coffee, and trying to receive a more equitable price. In this way, she is sustaining a family business with four generations’ worth of history in coffee.

In 2020, it was the first year Doña Rita processed her own coffee at her farm Finca Pergujal. This lot is a full honey, dried in the sun on raised beds. For Doña Rita, one of the most important aspects of her work is the conservation and protection of natural resources. Therefore, she devotes a percentage of her land to the protection of the forest and fauna. In 2019 she grew approximately 180 species of trees native to the area between the coffee trees, giving a home to birds including goldfinches and toucans. Doña Rita’s land also has soil of volcanic origin, due to its proximity to Poás Volcano. Doña Rita firmly believes that the volcanic soil, the altitude, the temperature, the amount of rain, the new varieties she is growing, combined with the love that her family puts into coffee, will lead her smallholding to produce very high-quality coffee.

More about Bean Voyage & their engagement in Costa Rica

Bean Voyage is a feminist, non-profit organization working with women coffee producers with the objective of eradicating gender gap in farming communities.

Bean Voyage launched its pilot program with two smallholder women in 2016; training them to turn coffee cherries into market-ready coffee and connecting them to buyers. Between 2017-2019, they tested their program with 130 smallholder women developing an extensive curriculum on topics such as quality analysis, market readiness, post-harvest practices and financial literacy, yielding impressive results.

Between 2020-21, the programs were scaled up to serve more than 540 women farmers, while growing the curriculum to better prepare smallholder women farmers with tools and knowledge to combat continuing challenges of climate change, food insecurity and economic volatility. Today, an average Bean Voyage farmer earns 212% more in annual coffee sales revenue than the market prices and their program has reached over 2,400 community members in all eight coffee producing regions of Costa Rica.  

Finally, Bean Voyage acts as an exporter, connecting producers with importing partners (like our importing partner Falcon Specialty) and finally roasters. As such Bean Voyage together with Falcon provide the ever important link and access to speciality coffee markets with buyers purchasing their coffee at profitable prices.

To lean more visit their website: Bean Voyage

Brewing recipes:

Orea

20g. coffee | 320g. filtered water

1st pour - bloom with 75g water
2nd pour - at 50 sec, up to 220g
3rd pour - at 1min 30 sec, up to 320g

Cafetiere coming soon!