Cracked the bag open with high expectations. Anaerobic naturals from Costa Rica have been on heavy rotation for me lately, and the aroma off this one when I broke the seal was already telling me I was in for something.
This is the Hermano Robles El Chiral Typica Anaerobic from Presta Coffee. Grown at 1800 masl in San Marcos, Tarrazu, by Carlos Robles and his sons Leo and Elian. They've been running their own micro wet mill for thirteen years and were among the early micro-millers in Tarrazu back in the early 2000s.
The first sips
Brewed it on the Fellow Aiden — medium roast, 3-cup setting, no other tinkering on the first pour.
First sips came in a little savory, with a red wine finish on the back end. Anaerobic naturals usually do this cinnamon-and-cocoa-nib thing, and that's here, but the red wine angle is doing more of the work than I expected.
As it cools
The cup gets better. Those red wine notes move into the body and start showing up in the acidity, and there's a jammy quality that keeps pulling me back. Syrupy. Fruit-forward. I kept hitting the bottom of the cup sooner than I meant to.
The tasting notes Presta lists on the bag — blackberry, raisin, red wine, key lime pie — feel honest. I'm not sure I'd have landed on key lime pie on my own, but once you have it in your head it tracks. There's a bright lift on the finish that fits.
The processing
For the nerds:
This is a natural anaerobic. The Robles family floats the cherries to separate floaters from the ripe stuff, ferments in tanks for a couple of days, then pre-dries the cherries in big mounds on their concrete patios before moving them to a static mechanical dryer set at low temperatures. The whole drying process runs about a week.
That slow, low-temp drying is a big part of why this cup stays clean. Anaerobic work has a way of getting weird in a bad way if you're not careful, and you can taste it when someone hasn't paid attention to the drying.
The Robles family also rests their straight naturals in closed sacks with pulp and parchment for about a month after drying, on the theory that the bean keeps picking up complexity from the fruit. I don't know if that's exactly what's happening chemically. The cup is good though.
Final cup
Fun, fresh, wild Costa Rica. Exactly what I want from this style. I'm going to keep messing with the Aiden recipes from here, but the medium roast 3-cup setting is a perfectly fine place to start if you pick up a bag.
Carlos, Leo, Elian — keep crushing it. This one's fire.
