DAK – Booze Cruise 250g | Costa Rica

About This Coffee

Booze Cruise is a 2026 harvest lot from Aquiares Estate, in Turrialba, Costa Rica, grown by Diego Robelo. Aquiares is one of the country's largest single coffee farms and sits on the slopes of the Turrialba volcano at around 1200 metres, on the wet Caribbean side of the country — lower and considerably rainier than Costa Rica's better-known growing areas further west, which makes a slow anaerobic natural a demanding thing to pull off there.

The variety is Centroamericano, an F1 hybrid crossing Sarchimor T-5296 with Sudan Rume. Those two parents sit at opposite ends of the same argument. Sarchimor T-5296 was bred for disease resistance and yield — the kind of plant that keeps a farm viable through a bad leaf rust year. Sudan Rume is the opposite bet: a wild-collected Ethiopian type with a reputation for a remarkable cup and very little else going for it agronomically. The hybrid is an attempt to take the cup from one and the durability from the other, and Aquiares has been among the farms doing the most to prove it works at scale.

The lot is processed and dried as an anaerobic natural. Whole cherries go into a sealed environment and ferment without oxygen before drying in the fruit rather than being washed clean of it. Two things happen at once: the fruit sugars work their way into the seed as they would in any natural, and the closed ferment steers which organisms do that work and how far they take it. What comes out is heavier and more layered than an open-air natural, and it is where the coffee gets the boozy edge the name is pointing at.

In the cup: purple grapes, cherry praline and brown sugar. Syrupy and textured, with the grape carrying most of the way through and the praline sitting underneath it.

Freshly roasted by DAK Coffee Roasters in Amsterdam and imported to the UK by ROAST EDIT Co.