This exceptional coffee shows what is possible when collaboration throughout the coffee chain is driven by a shared commitment to quality: grown by smallholders farmers in a forest reserve and honey-processed by a cooperative that identifies and markets the very best coffees its members can produce. Coffee came to Central America in the late eighteenth century during the colonial period, but it didn’t become a significant part of the region’s economy until after independence from Spain, in the second half of the nineteenth century. And even then, the coffee industries in each of the five Central American republics evolved at different rates due to variations in the colonial economies that preceded them. While the coffee industries in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua were centered around large plantations, Costa Rica’s was built around small-scale production: a large number of growers farming small plots of land. The more recent history of Costa Rica’s coffee sector revolves around its “micromill revolution” — a trend in which small groups of growers or individual families process their coffees at a larger number of small-scale coffee mills for quality-focused buyers. This trend has moved coffee away from Costa Rica’s traditional cooperatives. Today, Intelligentsia’s Direct Trade network in Central America reflects both of these historical influences: Costa Rica is home to our most important relationship with a smallholder cooperative anywhere in the region, as well as a relationship with an exciting new family-run farming and milling operation.