Hacienda La Minita - Part Two: On the Slopes of Tarrazú

August 23, 2025

Coffee cherry piles high above the edges of a blue trailer

Hacienda La Minita sits between two rivers, the Tarrazú and the Candelaria, in the coffee growing region of Los Santos, San Jose Province.

An industrial station sits in a mountain valley, with a large red truck visible at a loading dock

The coffee mill and processing station, cupping labs, and offices sit at the base of the mountain, which stretches into the sky, slopes covered in coffee plants or wilded nature preserves, dirt roads, a workers' village with clinics, and a guest house with lodgings at 5,000 feet.

Sun rises over a mountaintop, as a house sits on the slope surrounded by native plants

The farm rises even higher, up to 6,000 feet. 1,200 vertical acres are hard to comprehend, so let’s start at the guest house.

We arrived a few weeks into the harvest, so the coffee plants around our lodgings had been picked clean. The mountain is harvested as the plants typically ripen, from top to bottom, so while there were no coffee cherries on display at the guest quarters, we were still surrounded by beautiful, native landscaping, including thousands of citrus trees for the full time employees to use in their cooking.

A bright Bird of Paradise flower blooms yellow and blueish purple

All of our experiences were unique and absolutely once in a lifetime, but I feel obligated to note, we also knew that they were uniquely tailored to us.

Two figures stand on a cleared path between small coffee plants on a hillside

From distance, a man strides through a field of coffee plants, machete swinging from his belt, bucket in hand

After visiting the nursery where thousands of seeds are planted and grown into saplings under ideal conditions, we took trees up the mountain and each of us planted one.

A row of men bend low to shovel dirt as they plant coffee trees on a hillside

With close to 2 million trees on the estate, the slopes are in a constant state of maturation and renewal.

A man smiles at the camera behind a coffee tree he planted. The sign beside him labels the plant, his name Bob Benck, and Dancing Goats Kaldi's Coffee 2023

We also got to see Bob’s very own coffee tree, which he planted back in 2023, an old-school Typica variety of Híbrido Tico that’s made way for the more popular Caturra varieties lately. Bob is old-school cool, so it’s very allowable.

A man wades through mature coffee trees, a water bottle protruding from his shirt pocket

Then it was time for some “hard work” - We picked coffee cherries for an hour. It was hard work, and we worked more slowly and inefficiently than any of the people who actually do this work 8 hours a day, 7 days a week during harvest.

Bright red and yellow coffee cherry sits in wicker baskets

A steep hillside is lined with coffee trees

Balancing your body and the basket as it grows heavier while navigating the slope of the mountain was strenuous and we were all relieved when it was time to stop and head to a roadside station to deliver our coffee.

Men gather around a trailer, as one prepares to hoist a large basket of coffee from the ground to the waiting hands of a man in the trailer

Men gather around a trailer as one man hoists coffee high over his head into the waiting arms of another man above him in the trailer

On the roadside, workers were in full swing, carrying their day's pickings to the mobile receiving station where it was quickly checked for quality and quantity. La Minita installed a digital payment system a few years ago, meaning every day laborer was paid on the spot, directly into their bank accounts.

Men gather around a truck with coffee they picked. One man hands his basket of coffee up to another in the truck's trailer

During harvest, the farm’s 80 full-time employees are joined by 150 contracted laborers, and at peak they’re all joined by up to 500 more day workers that come from across the countryside, or migrate seasonally up from Panama or even down from Nicaragua. Pay rates are posted outside the farm so workers know what they can earn at the farm, and the management team monitors the entire valley’s rates to stay competitive. The day we picked, only one farm in the entire surrounding area was paying a higher rate.

3 story painted banyan trees stretch up, as a tractor hauling a blue trailer of coffee trundles down a dirt road

Out for a walk, on the road below the guest house, we encountered a tractor, loaded with coffee from the day’s pickings. Because the farm is largely unpaved, tractors with large trailers dot the landscape, so coffee can be received from the slopes easily.

A tractor sits in the foreground, behind it a misty hillside holds silhouetted trees

These tractors then bring the coffee to receiving stations, where it’s measured again, samples are taken and logged, then it’s put in trucks which leave the farm to drive the long way down the mountain, on paved roads, to the mill.

A village of medium sized houses sits behind a common field, with blue and white walls and red roofs

An interior of the medical clinic shows a clean desk and sink, with jungle visible outside the window

We followed it down, past the worker’s village which consists of 25 houses for the families of full time staff, as well as a medical and dental clinic, to a permanent receiving station where we got to witness the coffee being measured again.

A man leans back inside a shed, pulling a large bin of coffee along slide rails

Samples are taken and logged, everything is uploaded so the mill and the offices can see the coffee's status as it makes its way down the mountain, and then the coffee drops through funnels and into heavier Mack trucks, which leave the farm to drive the long way down the mountain, on paved roads, to the mill. We'll get down the mountain to the mill in Part Three, coming soon!