Cafe San Luis
Cafe San Luis Coffee is not only a local favorite, but bought by customers as far away as the United States and Canada.
Victor Ramirez has been working solely with coffee for 30 years. He grew up in San Luis and worked for 22 years shelling, toasting, and packaging coffee for the Santa Elena Cooperative. When the Cooperative stopped buying coffee altogether in 2008, Victor was encouraged by friends and family to start his own business, since he had so many years of experience processing and producing coffee. In 2008, Victor borrowed money to buy his own machinery and sold his first batch of coffee to UGA in San Luis.
Now, Cafe San Luis has been in business for seven years and is going strong. In addition to UGA, Coffee San Luis is sold in souvenir shops, hotels, and the Monteverde Institute in the Monteverde and Santa Elena regions. Victor even has clients in other provinces of Costa Rica, including La Fortuna, Guanacaste, and Tamarindo, to simply mention a few. This is a very impressive feat for a coffee farm that stretches only 200 meters out at its furthest point from the family's main house.
In addition to managing his farm, Victor works at the Beneficio de Cafe de San Luis, a coffee processing plant, during the harvest season, which is also the high season for tourism. During this three month period from November to January, Victor works mornings at Cafe San Luis and heads to the Beneficio in the afternoon where he toasts coffee until as late as midnight. Though this is a tiresome time of the year for Victor, the extra income helps his family live more
comfortably and he enjoys helping his friends at the Beneficio who appreciate the quality of the coffee he toasts. His daughter and wife, Deina, who run the Cafe and help look after the farm are critical during this busy season.
Sustainability is a key component of this quaint family farm. Though Cafe San Luis is not certified organic, it uses no chemicals whatsoever. Walking along the winding path through the farm, guests are surrounded by butterflies fluttering between the colorful bunches of flowers, and cool shade is provided by the mango, banana, platano and avocado trees mingled among the coffee seedlings and mature stalks. Additionally, the water used to strip coffee beans of their sticky outer layer is reused to water the growing coffee, and the left-over shells are transformed into compost.
"One of the aspects of our farm that our family is most proud of is the completeness and authenticity of our Cafetal Coffee Tour. We explain everything from the germination of seeds, to planting, how we create eight different varieties of coffee, and how to harvest, shell, toast, and taste the different flavors of the coffee. Guests are welcome to try shelling and roasting coffee the old-fashioned way in the "casa antigua," or ancestral home that my wife was born in, that lies just behind our home. It's truly the full experience."
- Victor Ramierz