Costa Rican Coffee: Tarrazú, Honey Process and What to Buy
Key takeaways
Costa Rica grows well under 1% of the world's coffee (about 1.17 million bags forecast for 2025/26) but supplies 618 in-stock coffees on Cuppd from 283 roasters.
It is the honey-process country: 152 of the 574 honey-processed coffees on Cuppd, more than one in four, are Costa Rican.
Single-origin lots split almost evenly three ways: washed 29.5%, honey 28.6%, natural 28.0%.
Tarrazú is the name on the bag most often: 200 of the 430 lots that carry a region tag.
Robusta was banned from the late 1980s until a 2018 decree, and commercial planting still waits on ICAFE trials.
Questions this article answers
What does Costa Rican coffee taste like?
Is Costa Rican coffee good?
What is Tarrazú coffee?
What is honey process coffee?
Does Costa Rica grow robusta coffee?
What is the best Costa Rican coffee to buy?
Costa Rica grows about 1.17 million bags of coffee a year — roughly 0.65% of the world's crop. It has no volume advantage, no cost advantage, and wages that make cheap coffee impossible. So it did the only thing left: it got obsessively, systematically good.
The result is out of all proportion to the size: 618 Costa Rican coffees are in stock on Cuppd right now from 283 roasters in 33 countries — about one in every 22 bags on the site. Here is why, what they taste like, and which one to start with.
Costa Rica in stock right now
Why is Costa Rican coffee so highly rated?
Because the farms took control of their own processing, and processing is where most of the flavour gets made or lost. For most of the 20th century, Costa Rican growers sold cherries to big cooperative mills where their harvest disappeared into a regional blend. Careful picking earned you nothing, because nobody knew whose coffee was whose.
In the early 2000s, with coffee prices at record lows, families started installing their own small wet mills. Suddenly a farm could process its own harvest, split it by variety and picking day, put its name on the bag and sell straight to a roaster in Oslo or Portland. Coffee Review calls that micromill revolution the thing that created Costa Rica's modern identity, and it is visible on the shelf: most Costa Rican bags on Cuppd name a farm, a family or a mill rather than just a region.
Micromill (micro-beneficio): a small processing setup owned by one farm or a handful of neighbours. It is the reason a Costa Rican bag can name one family and one lot instead of a cooperative.
It came with a cost. Costa Rica's planted area has fallen to about 83,000 hectares and its registered growers to fewer than 26,000, down 46% in a decade, according to USDA figures reported by Daily Coffee News. The farms that stayed are the ones that went small and specific — which is exactly the coffee that ends up in specialty shops.
What is honey process coffee, and why is Costa Rica famous for it?
Honey processing sits between washed and natural: the skin comes off, but some of the sticky fruit layer stays on the bean while it dries. More fruit left on means more sugar, more body, and more risk of the whole thing fermenting into a mess. Costa Rica made it a signature, and the numbers show it: 152 of the 574 honey-processed coffees in stock on Cuppd are Costa Rican, more than one in four. Across the whole catalogue honey is about 4% of coffees; among single-origin Costa Ricans it is 29%. For the method side by side with washed and natural, see our processing methods guide.
Mucilage: the sticky, sweet layer between the coffee skin and the bean. How much of it stays on during drying, and how slowly it dries, is the whole difference between white, yellow, red and black honey.
- White and yellow honey: the least mucilage and the quickest drying in the sun. Clean and bright, close to a washed coffee with extra sweetness.
- Red honey: more mucilage, slower drying, often with partial shade. Fuller body, stone fruit, caramel — the sweet spot for most people.
- Black honey: nearly all the mucilage, dried slowly under cover for weeks. Dense, syrupy, jammy, and a nightmare to get right.
There is no national standard behind the colours; each mill sets its own. And most roasters do not print them: only 21 in-stock Costa Rican bags put a colour in the name — nine red, eight black, four white, zero yellow. If the bag just says 'honey', ask, or read the tasting notes. The honey lots overall taste the way the name promises: honey and caramel share the top spot at 16% each, followed by apple and apricot.
Honey process — red, black and beyond
Fun fact
One of the best-known honey and natural producers got there by accident. When an earthquake knocked out water and power at Las Lajas, Oscar and Francisca Chacón's micromill near Poás, mid-harvest, they could not wash their coffee, so they built raised beds and dried it with the fruit on. Las Lajas now appears on 45 in-stock lots on Cuppd.
What does Costa Rican coffee taste like?
Sweet and clean, with the process doing most of the talking. Across the 468 single-origin Costa Rican lots, roasters printed 'caramel' most often (16%), then chocolate, honey and cherry, and a chocolate or cocoa note of some kind turns up on 33% of them. That is the baseline: well-made, medium-bodied, never weird unless someone meant it to be.
Then the process splits it three ways, almost evenly. Washed is the biggest camp, but only just: 29.5% of single-origin lots, against honey 28.6% and natural 28.0%, and 10% carry an anaerobic step. Washed Costa Rica is the classic: caramel on 29% of washed lots, chocolate on 22%, almond on 14%, with lemon and citrus keeping it bright. Naturals swing to cherry (18%), strawberry and hibiscus. Honey sits in the middle, which is the point of it.
Washed Tarrazú — caramel, chocolate, citrus
Which Costa Rican coffee regions should you know?
Tarrazú first, because it is on the bag more than anything else: 200 of the 430 Costa Rican lots that carry a region tag, 47%. ICAFE recognises eight regions in total, and five of them do the heavy lifting on the shelf.
- Tarrazú (Los Santos): high, steep and cool, south of San José. Home of the big cooperatives CoopeTarrazú and Coopedota and of La Candelilla. Bright acidity, deep sweetness, the classic washed cup.
- Central Valley: 56 lots, around Alajuela and Heredia on the slopes of Poás. Las Lajas lives here, which is why so many Central Valley bags are honeys and naturals.
- West Valley: 53 lots, from Naranjo, Grecia and Palmares. Micromill country and a hotbed of honey experiments and rare varieties.
- Brunca: 33 lots, mostly from Chirripó in the south. Lower volumes, often very good value.
- Turrialba: 24 lots, lower and wetter, home of the Aquiares estate. Softer, rounder cups.
Orosi and Tres Ríos turn up on three lots each, Guanacaste on none. If a roaster bothers to source from them, it is usually worth a look.
Villa Sarchi: a dwarf mutation of Bourbon found in Costa Rica's Alajuela province in the 1950s or 1960s. Compact and wind-tolerant, it grows almost nowhere else — 22 of the 31 in-stock Villa Sarchi lots on Cuppd are Costa Rican.
What grows in those regions is mostly Caturra and Catuai: of the single-origin lots that name a variety, 42% carry Caturra and 38% Catuai. The ambitious farms add Geisha (48 lots), SL28 (33) and the local Villa Sarchi (21).
Beyond Caturra — Villa Sarchi, SL28, Geisha, Laurina
Is Costa Rica still arabica only?
In practice, yes. From the late 1980s it was illegal to plant robusta in Costa Rica at all — not discouraged, prohibited — to protect the country's arabica reputation. In 2018 Executive Decree 41110-MAG lifted the ban in principle, for low-lying zones where arabica struggles.
The catch: planting needs ICAFE's approval for each zone, after field trials. As of La Nación's September 2024 report, no commercial planting had been authorised, and ICAFE's own policy document said the research had to run until at least 2029. Every Costa Rican coffee you will find in a specialty shop is arabica.
Which roasters sell the most Costa Rican coffee?
For most roasters, Costa Rica is one bag on the menu. Of the 283 roasters selling it, 161 have exactly one Costa Rican coffee in stock and only 22 carry five or more. The top two, Supremo and Bearded Coffee, hold 40 lots between them — 6% of the shelf, nothing like the concentration you see with a trophy variety.
Raw counts flatter some shops, though. Bearded Coffee's 16 listings are a handful of coffees in several roasts and bag names, and Finest Coffee and Tea (14), Doubleshot (11, five of them the same decaf) and Volcanica (10) have one coffee between them with the farm data our coffee pages need. So the cards below go to the three deepest lists of genuinely different coffees.
Supremo, near Munich, has the widest spread: Wush Wush, ET47, SL28 and an improved Typica from named farms, plus Costa Rica in 13 of its blends. Red Rooster in Virginia puts Las Lajas and La Candelilla on the same menu, which is a neat way to taste two micromill philosophies back to back. 7 grams, in Italy, is the experimenter: its nine listings are six coffees, three of them sold twice, and five of the six name an anaerobic, extended or thermal-shock fermentation on the bag.
How should you buy your first Costa Rican coffee?
Buy a red honey from a named micromill. It is the most Costa Rican thing you can drink — the sweetness of a natural with most of the clarity of a washed coffee, made by someone who raked it by hand for weeks. Brew it as filter, and resist the urge to add milk until you have tasted it black once.
Then go sideways: a washed Tarrazú to see the baseline, and a natural from the Central Valley to see how far one country can stretch. Honey lots vary hugely from mill to mill, so log what you drink on Cuppd. Browse all 618 Costa Rican coffees in stock and start with whichever colour of honey you have never tried.
How did we count 618 Costa Rican coffees?
Every number on this page is a count from the Cuppd catalogue, not an estimate. Specifically:
- Source: the product listings on 940 specialty roasters' own online shops, not marketplaces or resellers. A coffee counts once per listing, which is why the roaster section calls out shops that list one coffee several times.
- In stock: every coffee is re-checked against the roaster's shop once a month. All 618 lots were confirmed available on 2 October 2026.
- Origin: as the roaster labels it. 468 of the 618 are single-origin Costa Rica; the other 150 are blends or multi-origin lots that include it. Taste, process and variety shares use the 468 single-origin lots only.
- Regions: matched on the region the roaster names, with spellings merged (Tarrazú, Tarrazu and Los Santos count as one). 188 lots name no region and are left out of the region figures.
- Tasting notes: the roaster's own notes, mapped onto a shared vocabulary of 330 notes. A lot can list several notes and several processes, so shares do not add up to 100%.
- Not ranked: nothing here is scored or sponsored. Roasters are ordered by how many Costa Rican coffees they stock, nothing else.
Costa Rica on the price index
October 2026€67 per kg at the median, +17% vs all coffees. Half of Costa Rica coffees cost between €52 and €84/kg, across 383 coffees from 235 roasters.
See the Cuppd Specialty Coffee Price Index →