Costa Rica´s Best Guide Online Magazine

El grano de oro (the golden bean) has been a vital ingredient in the social, economic, and cultural development of Costa Rica for over two centuries with the first exports going out in 1820. It has been an important part of the development of Latin America´s most stable and longest lasting democracy. The very high quality of Costa Rican coffee beans has led many coffee roasters in the United States to use it to raise the quality of other less expensive coffees when creating blends. Costa Rica is very proud of its reputation for growing what is arguably the best coffee in the world and passed a law about 50 years ago making it illegal to grow any other type of coffee such as the robusta variety. In fact, the golden bean is so important to Costa Rica that it has its

own government branch: the Costa Rica Coffee Institute (Instituto del Café) which originated in 1933 as the Institute for the Defense of Coffee and whose first President would go on 3 years later to become President of Costa Rica. This was Don León Cortés Castro who was a very good friend of my father. You can see a statue of a lion in his honor where Paseo Colón starts near the old airport building in San José which is currently an art museum. Coffee grown worldwide can trace its heritage back centuries to the ancient coffee forests on the Ethiopian plateau. Legend says the goat herder Kaldi first discovered the potential of these wonder beans. The story goes that Kaldi discovered coffee after he noticed that after eating berries