Costa Rica

Why this origin matters

Costa Rica is a small producer whose coffee sells abroad at a premium, and the reason, on the USDA attaché's account, is organisational as much as agricultural. It grows only arabica and exports most of what it grows. Over a decade processing has spread into many more hands: the national coffee institute counted 210 mills in the 2013/14 season and 308 ten years later, many of them micro-mills serving a handful of neighbouring farms, a change the attaché ties to growers selling smaller, separate lots at higher prices. The same decade has a harder story underneath it: the number of growers has roughly halved.

Where coffee grows

The coffee institute divides the country into eight growing regions. By planted area the largest is Los Santos, which includes Tarrazú, with a little over a third of the national total in the institute's 2022 survey; then the Occidental Valley, the Central Valley with Tres Ríos, and the two parts of Brunca in the south, Pérez Zeledón and Coto Brus. Turrialba and the northern zone in Guanacaste are small and shrinking. The canton of Tarrazú has been the highest-producing canton for seven seasons running. Farms are small: in the 2023/24 season 85 per cent of growers produced fewer than a hundred 60-kilogram bags, on holdings under ten hectares.

The growing year turns on one wet and one dry season. Flowering follows the first rains, around late April, and in 2025 the meteorological institute expected the rainy season to be established across the coffee regions by mid-May. Rain that arrives at the wrong end of the year does the damage: heavy rain in November and December, when the dry season should be starting, has cut the last two crops by knocking fruit off the trees and by arriving when there are too few pickers to bring it in.

Species and varieties

Arabica only; the official production tables carry no robusta at all. Which arabica varieties make up the crop is not something the sources read for this page set out, so CoffeeHQ does not list them here.

Harvest

Concentrated between November and February. It begins around August at lower altitudes in the south and can run to about May on the highest farms. Pickers move from region to region as the fruit ripens; in recent seasons the weather has ripened several regions at once, which is a labour problem as much as an agricultural one.

How the coffee is processed

The report read for this page does not say how Costa Rican coffee is processed. The International Coffee Organization's price rules list Costa Rica Hard Bean among the Other Mild Arabicas, the group they keep apart from natural arabicas. Beyond that, the country is associated in the trade with washed coffee and with honey processing, in which some of the fruit's mucilage is left on the seed while it dries; CoffeeHQ has read no source for how much of the crop is processed either way. What the report does document is the growth in mill numbers, which it attributes to a trend towards smaller lots that let producers capture higher prices.

How it is graded and sold

Almost everything exported is green, unroasted coffee. Just over a million 60-kilogram bags left the country in the 2023/24 season. The United States had long taken close to half; in 2023/24 its share fell to 38 per cent and the European Union became the largest market at about 41 per cent. In 2024/25, on the 2026 edition of the report, the United States took 39.6 per cent. Because local coffee sells at a premium abroad, Costa Rica has imported cheaper coffee since about 2008, mainly from Honduras and Nicaragua, to supply part of what it drinks at home.

What it tends to taste like

No description of how Costa Rican coffee tastes is given here. The report read for this page offers none, and CoffeeHQ has no measurement to offer in its place.

Preparation traditions

How coffee is traditionally prepared and served in this country, in CoffeeHQ's international preparation atlas.

• Costa Rican chorreador

History

Pressures on the sector

• The number of growers fell from more than 47,000 to about 25,500 over roughly a decade, according to the national coffee institute, and to 24,653 in the 2024/25 season. Long periods of low prices, ageing farmers and high land prices near towns are the reasons it gives.
• Planted area fell by about 12 per cent between the institute's 2018 and 2022 surveys, to roughly 83,000 hectares.
• Labour. Most of the crop is now picked by workers of the Ngäbe-Buglé people from Panama, where Nicaraguan workers once made up most of the force, and an estimated 150,000 bags were lost in the 2024/25 season to a combination of fruit ripening early and all at once, persistent rain during the harvest and too few pickers.
• The exchange rate. Coffee is sold in US dollars, and the institute estimates that a stronger colón has cut growers' revenue: by nearly a fifth since the 2022/23 season in the attaché's 2025 report, and by nearly 30 per cent since 2021/22 in its 2026 report. The two editions date the exchange rate's peak to different seasons.