This is In My Mug coffee number 936, roasted and posted to subscribers on Friday 16th October 2026.

This cup opens with silky, sweet wine gums and the zingy lift of lime and raspberries. Juicy black grapes come in on the finish of this well-rounded and fruity coffee.

For a few years in the early 2000s, Allan Oviedo Rodríguez worked two jobs that never overlapped. By night he drove a taxi around San José. By morning he was back up the mountain in Grecia, working the coffee farm his father had left him.

Today he runs one of the most respected micromills in Costa Rica's Western Valley, and he has a string of Cup of Excellence results behind him. The taxi is a long way back down the road.

Nights in San José

Allan grew up in coffee, learning traditional methods from his father, Don Joel, and his brothers. He's one of ten siblings, and five of them work in coffee. When Don Joel passed away, Allan inherited part of the original family land, Finca La Cumbre, and with it a problem shared by many Costa Rican producers at the time. He was selling his cherry to local mills at low market prices. That left him with very little say over how it was processed, and very little over what it was worth.

The taxi kept the farm going. Night shifts in the city paid the bills, and the daylight hours went into the land. It's the kind of grit that underpins everything Allan has built since.

Don Joel

Building his own micromill was the dream, because it would let him process his own coffee and sell it on its own merits. When he finally got there, there was only ever one name it could carry. The Don Joel Micromill is named in honour of his father, and Allan has now been running it for well over a decade, alongside his son Ignacio.

It sits just below Volcán Poás, bordering the Grecia Forest Reserve, surrounded by steep, rocky slopes and dense coffee trees. You need a truck to get there because the roads are rough, but the views more than make up for it. One of Allan's brothers owns the neighbouring farm and sends his cherry to the mill too, and Allan and his wife, Daysi, live just a mile away from the farms and mill. This is still very much a family operation. The mill has built enough of a reputation that, when there's space, it also processes small lots for neighbours around San Luis.

Success at auction and in competition has let Allan reinvest. He has bought back the rest of his father's land and expanded his plantings of Villa Sarchi, Typica and SL28. His Kenia (SL28) from Finca Carmela took third place at the 2024 Costa Rica Cup of Excellence, in the Traditional Semi-Washed, Honey and Natural Processes category. That result caps a run of CoE finishes that includes 29th place in 2017, 18th in 2021 and 15th in 2022.

How we met

We were introduced to Allan in 2017, the same year he placed in his first Cup of Excellence, by Francisco Mena of Exclusive Coffees, who we work with to source all of our Costa Rican coffees. We've bought from him every year since, and long-time subscribers will know Finca Carmela well: it has appeared in In My Mug before, including IMM 720 in 2022 and IMM 879 last year.

Those first coffees were quite the introduction. Both were Villa Sarchi lots from La Cumbre and both were yellow honey processed. The difference was in the drying: one lot was dried on concrete patios, the other on raised beds. Stephen Leighton wrote all of our tasting notes back then, and of the patio lot he said:

"In the cup you're going to find a lot of sweetness, with a candy floss type finish. There's a very interesting acidity that reminds me of pineapple, really clean, sharp and delicious."

And of the raised-bed lot:

"In the cup this is sweet sweet sweet, the candy floss finish from the patio dried lot remains and is more dominant, almost like the sweetness volume has been turned up. The acidity and pineapple also remain but in a slightly toned down style, however there's an increase in body, aftertaste and mouthfeel."

Same farm, same variety, same process, and two quite different cups. It's still one of the neatest demonstrations we've had of how much a single decision at the mill can shape what ends up in your mug.

If you were with us for IMM 931, you've been in the neighbourhood very recently. Arbar Micromill is only around five miles from Don Joel as the toucan flies, although the mountain roads turn that into a 45-minute drive. Villa Sarchi is everywhere in this part of Costa Rica, and a good deal of the coffee we buy from the country comes from this same stretch of hillside.

Visits both ways

In January 2023, our Head of eCommerce, Chris, joined Green Buyer Roland on his first ever trip to a coffee-producing country. After years of writing about these farms for our website, it was a chance to see them first-hand, and to meet the people behind coffees he'd loved drinking. Allan showed them round Finca Carmela, La Cumbre and the mill, which he had just rebuilt and was still gleaming, and gave them a ride on the back of his tractor with a trailer full of freshly picked cherry. Then they helped unload it at the mill, measuring it out in the fanega box that Costa Rican mills use as their standard measure. The day finished with a home-cooked meal with Allan, his wife Daysi, and their two children.

"To a lot of us, coffee is something we drink and enjoy in very set ways," says Chris. "But to see it growing on the trees and being processed, and to get to sit down for a meal with a producer like Allan and his family, is a real honour. It gives you a whole new appreciation for the delicious little caffeinated drink in your mug."

Later that year, the visit was returned. In October 2023, Allan and Daysi travelled to the UK with a group of Costa Rican producers, including Joyce from Granitos and Francisco from Sumava, and Chris spent time with them in Manchester and London. The standout moment was guiding Allan and Daysi across London on some very packed Tube trains. Chris doesn't speak Spanish and they don't speak English, but they navigated the network together and had plenty of fun doing it. Having been shown their corner of Costa Rica, it was an honour to show them a little of ours.

It's a small story, but it says a lot about how we want our producer relationships to work. At heart, yes, we're buying Allan's coffee. But we don't want things to stop there, with coffee travelling one way and money the other. We want relationships that are involved and run both ways: visiting each other, sharing meals and stories, and being part of each other's worlds a little. As we approach ten years of buying from Don Joel, we're hoping for many more years of delicious coffee with Allan and his family.

You can read more about that first trip in our journal: Why we travel to origin.

Two farms, two climates

This year's lot comes from Finca Carmela, a three-hectare plot just a five-minute drive from La Cumbre. It's planted with Villa Sarchi, Typica and Kenia, and it sits on the border between Costa Rica's Central and Western Valleys at around 1,600 metres above sea level.

For two farms so close together, La Cumbre and Carmela behave very differently. Rain can fall on one side of the hill and not the other. Wind buffets one farm while the other stays sheltered, and sunlight reaches them at different times of day. Those small differences affect flowering, plant health and how the cherry ripens, which is why Allan treats the two farms as distinct and keeps their lots separate. Carmela's conditions are particularly well suited to specialty coffee, and it's where he has coaxed out the results that have drawn buyers from all over the world.

A variety from down the road

Villa Sarchi is about as local as a coffee variety gets. It's a natural dwarf mutation of Bourbon, discovered in the 1950s or 1960s in the town of Sarchí, roughly ten miles from where Allan farms today. Grecia's historic canton once took in the land that is now Sarchí, so in a sense this variety was found in Allan's own backyard.

It's barely grown outside Costa Rica. Its compact size makes it well suited to steep mountain farms, and it copes well with the altitude and strong winds of the Western Valley. In the cup it's known for clean, bright acidity, sweetness and fruit, and it takes to honey and washed processing beautifully. It was the variety that first brought Allan's coffee to us, and it remains one of the best expressions of what this corner of Costa Rica can do. You can read more about it in our Villa Sarchi varietal guide.

Honey processed

This lot is honey processed. The cherry skin is removed but some of the sticky fruit, the mucilage, is left on the bean while it dries. That fruit adds sweetness and body to the cup, and it's a style that suits Villa Sarchi's natural brightness particularly well. If you'd like to know more about how the process works, have a read of our guide to honey processing.

Built to last

Farming at the foot of an active volcano comes with its challenges. In 2017, Volcán Poás, around seven kilometres from La Cumbre, began its most intense period of eruptions in decades, and ash fell on Allan's plants. El Niño conditions around the same time lengthened the dry season and cut rainfall, and Carmela felt it most.

Allan's response has been steady, careful improvement. He brought in meticulous recordkeeping, new varieties and refined farming and processing techniques, and he produces his own fertiliser from native microorganisms. He also selects seed from his own healthiest trees, the ones best adapted to his microclimate on the slopes of Poás, so each new planting is a little better suited to the farm than the last. These are the kinds of changes that add up year after year into something genuinely distinctive. His recent trip to World of Coffee in Copenhagen shows how far his reputation now reaches, and how many roasters and importers are paying attention.

You can read more about Allan and his family on our producer story page.

Traceability

• Country: Costa Rica
• Region: Western Valley
• Province: Alajuela
• Canton: Grecia
• Community: San Luis
• Micromill: Don Joel
• Farm: Finca Carmela
• Producer: Allan Oviedo Rodríguez and family
• Elevation: 1,600 m.a.s.l.
• Variety: Villa Sarchi
• Processing method: Honey
• Relationship since: 2017

Cupping scores

Cupping notes: Wine gums, lime, raspberry, black grape.

Cup of Excellence Cupping Scores

• Clean Cup: 6.5/8
• Sweetness: 7/8
• Acidity: 6/8
• Mouthfeel: 6/8
• Flavour: 6.5/8
• Aftertaste: 6.5/8
• Balance: 6.5/8
• Overall: 6.5/8
• Total: 87.5/100

If you'd like to find out more about how we score coffees, have a read of What Do Coffee Cupping Scores Actually Mean?, and if you fancy trying cupping yourself, we've got a guide to that too: What is Coffee Cupping.

Medium - through first crack and keeping it steady before you drop midway into the gap.