Costa Rica Café La Cumbre Black Honey

In the highland valley of Tarrazú, locals call this place "La Cuna del Café," the cradle of Costa Rican coffee. At 1,650 meters in San Gabriel, the Jiménez family has worked the same volcanic slopes for ninety years. This black honey lot is their sweetest answer to a region already famous for sweetness.

OriginCosta Rica RegionSan Gabriel, Tarrazú Elevation1,650m ProcessBlack Honey (Reposado) VarietyCentroamericano The Source

Ninety Years on the Talamanca Slopes

Tarrazú sits in a southern highland valley ringed by the Talamanca mountains, where rich red volcanic soil and afternoon cloud cover shield the cherries from the hottest hours of sun. The region is widely regarded as the source of some of Costa Rica's finest arabica, and its high-altitude farms produce coffee with a round body, bright acidity, and a clean fruit-forward character.

Café La Cumbre is a 100-hectare farm in San Gabriel, San Marcos de Tarrazú, run by third-generation producers Nancy Gaitán and Minor Jiménez. Coffee has grown on this land for ninety years, and during harvest the farm draws on roughly 300 seasonal pickers who select only ripe cherry by hand. That selectivity is the foundation everything else is built on.

The Craft

Reposado: Resting the Cherry

Black honey is the most intensive end of the honey spectrum, and the reposado method pushes it further. Rather than depulping immediately, the Jiménez family rests freshly picked cherries for 36 to 40 hours, letting the natural sugars from pulp and mucilage migrate into the seed. The cherries are then depulped with much of the sticky mucilage left intact, and the coffee dries slowly as those sugars caramelize inward.

The result is a deeply sweet, full green coffee that we roast to City+ in small batches. That roast level keeps the caramelized sugar and fruit acidity in balance, never flattening the sweetness into something heavy. It is a careful roast for a carefully rested coffee.

Honey Dark Chocolate Red Apple Brown Sugar BodyMedium-Full AcidityMild-Bright The Cup

Sweetness With Structure

The cup opens on honey and brown sugar, the signature of a well-handled reposado lot. Beneath that sweetness sits a layer of dark chocolate that gives the coffee its weight, while crisp red apple keeps the finish lively rather than syrupy.

As it cools, the fruit stretches toward stone fruit and citrus, a nod to Tarrazú's reputation for aromatic complexity. This is honey processing at its most generous: rich, rounded, and clean from first sip to last.

Find Your Fix

This lot rewards a pour-over that showcases its sweetness, so a Chemex or V60 is a fine place to start, with a Beehouse or Drip setup pulling out the chocolate and body. Aeropress concentrates the brown-sugar core, and a slow Cold Brew turns it into something dessert-like. Browse the full lineup of coffee beans and find your fix.

Roasted in small batches at our Virginia Beach roastery.

Packaged in reusable glass mason jars, returned locally for reuse. Solar-roasted.

Virginia Beach, VA