The story of Perla Negra

In 2025 we had the opportunity to bring back an old friend of a coffee, Costa Rica Perla Negra. This coffee is special to us for more reasons beyond being very delicious. We asked our owner and founder, Jeff, for a reflection on Perla Negra to explain why this coffee is special and why we're so excited to have it back on our shelves! 

Perla Negra goes back to 2008 for us.

That was a strange moment in coffee. Commodity prices were low, farmers were under pressure, and a lot of producers were trying to figure out how to survive. At the same time, especially in Costa Rica, there was a push to do something different—to make coffees that could stand on their own instead of being tied to the market.

Perla Negra came out of that moment.

What stood out right away was the sweetness. It was off the charts, but calm. There was a mild, composed character to it that reminded me of coffees like Jamaica Blue Mountain, layered under a really developed natural process profile. Honestly, it felt closer to a natural wine than anything else we were serving at the time.

We brewed it as a pour-over using a 15:1 ratio with a fine grind. The brew time ran long—too long by the book—but the cup was great. The coffee made its case.

By then, we were already buying a couple of Cup of Excellence lots, so both the staff and our customers had started to understand that coffee could be something more than just “good.” The excitement around Perla Negra was real, and the staff energy behind it played a huge role in its success. That mindset never really went away. It’s still part of who we are.

This coffee also shifted how people thought about specialty coffee. A lot of consumers believed origin was the whole story. Perla Negra helped show that coffee is far more diverse than that—that processing, intention, and risk matter just as much as geography.

It also lived in an important middle space. Producers were paid above market prices, and customers got something genuinely special without paying auction-level prices like Cup of Excellence. That balance turned out to be meaningful for everyone involved.

For me, as a green buyer, Perla Negra brought a lot of excitement back into buying coffee. It also challenged us as a business. If producers were going to take these risks, we had to figure out how to sell coffees like this. That challenge eventually became what we now call our Curiosities line—a separate line with its own packaging for coffees that are unusual, expressive, and a little outside the norm.

Later on, visiting the farm and listening to Oscar talk about how they work really stuck with me. The amount of extra labor was obvious—easily four times what I’d seen at other farms. Every detail mattered. The parabolic drying chambers for the natural coffees were run at what felt like food-safety-level standards, not just farm standards.

I also remember conversations around biodynamic farming techniques, including timing work based on natural cycles like the sun and the moon. That was the first time I’d heard those ideas discussed seriously in a coffee production setting.

All of that care shows up in the cup. Coffees like this don’t happen by accident.

Perla Negra wasn’t just a memorable coffee.

It changed how we buy coffee.

And it helped shape where we’re headed