Costa Rica Black Honey Coffee

A black honey coffee from Brunca, in the south of Costa Rica. The bean dries with nearly all of its sticky fruit coat still on, which gives a syrupy body and dark, sweet flavors of molasses, plum, cacao and raisin.

Origin & Story

Black honey sits at the far end of the honey-process scale. The skin and pulp come off the cherry, but the sticky layer around the bean, the mucilage, is left in place and the coffee dries with nearly all of it on. White honey keeps the least mucilage, yellow and red keep more, and black keeps the most.

That sugary coat gives black honey coffee its character. The fruit sugars stay with the bean through drying, and the cup leans toward dark fruit, plum and raisin and something like stewed prune, with a syrupy body that can remind you of a natural-process coffee. Speed matters too. Slower drying tends to deepen and darken the flavors, while quick drying in strong sun keeps them lighter, so black honey coffees are generally dried with more patience than the lighter honeys.

This one is listed from Brunca, the region in the south of Costa Rica. Farms there grow coffee at elevations from roughly 800 to 1,900 meters, and the area around Pérez Zeledón is known for coffees with good acidity, body and aroma. Altitude matters for a style like this, because cherries that ripen slowly build more sugar, and sugar is what the process is all about.

Because black honey coffees can taste heavy when they are brewed carelessly, a clean, paper-filtered method keeps the cup lively. A Chemex is a good choice. Use water at 93°C, a medium-fine grind and 60 g of coffee to a liter of water, and notice how the molasses and cacao sweetness grows as the cup cools.

Reading the Flavor Profile

These values are comparative editorial positions within our own catalog, calibrated so entries can be ranked against each other. They are not laboratory measurements.