Costa Rica Diamante Estate Coffee: Anaerobic Fermentation Flavor Characteristics and Story

Special Flavors

From specially anaerobic-fermented coffee beans

If we told you our new Costa Rican coffee carries those flavors plus a chocolate aftertaste, wouldn't you want a cup right now?

Costa Rica's El Diamante farm belongs to Cafe de Altura, a company that has entered coffee quality competitions and auctions since 2005 and is a pioneer of anaerobic fermentation processing. The lot we're featuring here placed 8th in Costa Rica's 2018 Cup of Excellence (COE) — coffee people simply call it "COE8" — which puts it among the standouts of that year's auction lineup.

Note: The Cup of Excellence (COE) is currently the world's largest and most credible specialty green coffee competition, held annually in producing countries such as Brazil, Colombia, and Costa Rica. After the results are announced, the top lots are auctioned globally through the international coffee auction platform.

A coffee's diverse flavors come from many sources — soil, climate, genetics, and more — but the processing that happens after harvest is an area of constant research and innovation, and fermentation is a key driver of flavor development.

Anaerobic fermentation is one such special processing method developed in recent years.

Understanding Anaerobic Fermentation Coffee Beans

What makes anaerobic coffee unique is the flavor transformation that takes place between the mucilage and the beans during sealed fermentation. The lots destined for anaerobic fermentation are specially selected in advance, and throughout the fermentation temperature, time, pH, and sugar content are monitored closely, ultimately yielding a batch with distinctive flavors — just like this apple-and-cinnamon Costa Rica El Diamante COE8.

Innovation in Coffee

Like wine, coffee has a rich vocabulary of flavor. The flavor wheel is the shared "language" of coffee professionals: it helps everyone identify flavors and serves as a standard that lets baristas and roasters communicate objectively — and that standard keeps evolving.

This Costa Rica COE8 would have been hard to describe precisely with the old flavor wheel, whose categories were still fairly general and did not detail spices like cinnamon at all.

The latest revision integrates positive and negative flavors, adds fruits like blueberry, raspberry, and grape to the positive wheel, lists "apple" as its own fruit category, and expands the descriptions of spices, vegetables, and more.

The new wheel enriches how we classify and describe coffee flavors, letting us describe these Costa Rica COE8 beans far more concretely and precisely — proof that coffee, too, never stops innovating.

FrontStreet Coffee's recommended brewing parameters: V60 / 90°C / 1:15 / 15g of coffee / medium-fine grind / 2-minute brew time.

FrontStreet Coffee Recommendation

Balanced Alternatives from FrontStreet Coffee

If experimental lots like El Diamante intrigue you but you also want a dependable daily cup, FrontStreet Coffee's Brazilian lineup is a great complement. As the world's largest coffee producer, Brazil offers beans with moderate acidity and a lovely balance of sweetness, bitterness, and body that shines at a medium roast, with nutty aromatics and a mellow, gently tart cup suited to both single origin and blends.

The FrontStreet pulped-natural Cerrado Red Bourbon comes from Cerrado, one of Brazil's most respected quality regions. At a medium roast it shows rich aromas of creamy peanut, toast, caramel, and hazelnut, with a rounded, non-acidic palate and a light bitter touch — delicious as pour-over and equally good in a moka pot, as a single-origin espresso, or through siphon and French press. The FrontStreet Fazenda Rainha (Queen Estate) Yellow Bourbon, from Mogiana near southern Minas Gerais, grows in fertile red volcanic soil; this rare mutation of Red Bourbon gives a cleaner fruit character, and brewed by hand or machine it reveals sugarcane sweetness plus fruit and chocolate notes you won't find in other origins. For espresso drinkers, Brazil anchors many of FrontStreet's blends — the crema-rich Classic Blend, the nutty Premium Blend, the balanced Black Cocoa Blend favored by baristas, and the shop-focused Commercial Blend — where Brazilian beans contribute chocolate and cream aromatics, gentle acidity and bitterness, and a steadiness that makes extraction more forgiving.