Café Britt

Overview

Café Britt was founded in 1985 by Steve Aronson, a Bronx-born coffee broker who moved to Costa Rica in the 1970s and discovered that even the country's best hotels couldn't serve a decent local cup — all the high-grade beans were exported. Aronson lobbied to change Costa Rican law so a portion of export-quality beans could be reserved for domestic roasting, started in a rented garage outside Heredia, and built the country's first gourmet coffee roaster. The Britt name was chosen as a nod to Scandinavia, the world's heaviest coffee-drinking region, and the Britt Coffee Tour launched at the company's plantation in 1991 has now hosted over half a million visitors.

Known for

• Costa Rica's first gourmet coffee roaster — founded 1985 by Steve Aronson
• Aronson successfully lobbied to change Costa Rican export law to allow domestic roasting of export-grade beans
• Britt Coffee Tour — launched 1991, ~50,000 visitors per year, 500,000+ total
• First Britt Shop opened in 2001 at Juan Santamaría International Airport (started as a golf cart in 1994)
• Carbon Neutral certified for production in Costa Rica since 2013; 200,000+ bags of certified-organic coffee per year

Why it matters

Café Britt is the foundational example of roasting at origin in Latin America. Aronson's legal-and-marketing campaign in the late 1980s forced Costa Rica to change its own laws so the country could keep some of the coffee it had been exporting wholesale, then built a tourism-and-retail empire around the resulting product. Forty years on, it's still the country's largest specialty roaster and the model that several other Latin American origin-roasters have followed.

Production

destoning

null

head roaster

null

color sorting

null

roaster machine

null

filter equipment

null

cupping frequency

null

roastery location

Heredia, Costa Rica (with additional roasting in Peru and Colombia)

espresso equipment

null

annual volume tonnes

1000

Café

This roaster operates a café.

Recognitions

• First gourmet coffee roaster in Costa Rica (1985)
• Costa Rica country brand seal
• Carbon Neutral certified production (since 2013)

Sources

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caf%C3%A9_Britt
• https://www.cafebritt.com/blogs/journey-to-origin/looking-back-on-30-years-coffee-costa-rica-and-pura-vida
• https://ticotimes.net/2016/05/06/britt
• https://www.winespectator.com/articles/cafe-britt-pioneer-roaster-at-origin-50779
• https://www.thefreelibrary.com/Steve+Aronson:+Costa+Rican+coffee+pioneer.-a0103381825