Savour the trip, sip by sip
Coffee, like wine, is a moving target and the tasting never stops for connoisseurs, writes Bryan Miller
“COFFEE,” said Buzzy O’keeffe, the owner of the renowned River Café in Brooklyn, “is the last thing a restaurant diner tastes, so it better be good.”
For O’keeffe, it seems, it’s never good enough. Every couple of weeks he assembles his chef and several staff members for a blind tasting of brews from around the world.
Those that pass muster – typically under 20% – might find their way into the restaurant’s ever-changing house blend, which typically contains beans from Colombia, Brazil, Sumatra and Costa Rica.
“I have been searching for the perfect coffee since my thirties,” said O’keeffe, now in his discriminating seventies. “I have found that even the perfect blend will vary from time to time, depending on the year’s crop, something like wine but not quite as fickle.”
Last year, when I learned that he was planning a trip to coffee plantations in Costa Rica, I asked if I could tag along.
On a balmy Sunday evening we arrived in San José, the country’s sprawling capital. We drove 20 minutes to the town of Belen and the Costa Rica Marriott Hotel Hacienda Belen, a delightful Spanish colonial hotel with 299 rooms.
On our first morning we enjoyed a typical Costa Rican breakfast. It commenced with spectacular fruits and the country’s omnipresent national dish, called “gallo pinto” (spotted rooster). It’s a simple but tasty combination of black beans, rice, onions and cilantro. Our gallo pinto was served with the customary scrambled eggs, tortillas and natilla, which is like sour cream but not as thick. And on the table was a small bottle of the popular condiment called Lizano, which is like a sweetsavoury steak sauce.
O’keeffe was interested in comparing freshly-roasted Arabica coffee (Arabica beans are the highest quality; robusta beans are generally for the mass market) with what he purchases once the beans are exported to New York. (They should be very similar if delivered promptly and shielded from air and sunlight.)
Our first destination was a coffee company outside of San José called Café Britt. It was founded in 1985 by Steve Aronson, an American now living in Costa Rica and a world authority on coffee whose career dates to the early 1970s as an apprentice taster in Manhattan’s former coffee district, near the South Street Seaport.
“At that time all of the good Costa Rican coffee was exported, and the inferior stuff stayed here,” Aronson said. He wanted to change that. He launched the first gourmet coffee growing and roasting company in the country and began domestic distribution while at the same time building his export trade. Today, Britt coffee is sold throughout much of Central and South America.