Heredia · Costa Rica
Café Britt
Café Britt roasts in Heredia, Heredia Province.
Since 1985 · Steve Aronson
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
- roastery location
- Heredia, Costa Rica (with additional roasting in Peru and Colombia)
- 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)