This is In My Mug coffee number 929, roasted and posted to subscribers on Friday 28th August 2026.
This dessert in a cup begins with soft, cooked down peach before finishing with a sprinkle of brown sugar. On the aftertaste is a delicate strawberry edge, rounding out this well balanced, all day coffee.
If you've had a few of the recent IMM coffees, you might have noticed a theme. A washed Ethiosar from Finca Limoncillo, a relationship since 2007. A washed Centroamericano H1 from Finca Argentina, since 2008. Long-term buying is the part of specialty coffee we care about most, more than any single lot, so it's been a pleasure to send out a run of them back to back.
This week keeps the streak going. We're in Costa Rica, with the Bonilla family and their Don Mayo micromill, and we've been buying from them since 2012. A farm high above a hydroelectric dam, and a processing method the country made its own. Kettle on.
Fourteen years with the Bonillas
Back in 2012, our first coffee from Don Mayo came from Finca Bella Vista, up at 1,950 metres in León Cortés, looking out across the Los Santos zone towards the Cerro de la Muerte mountains. Ridiculous views. Very good coffee.
Since then the relationship has widened rather than moved on. We still buy from Don Mayo every year, and these days La Ladera is the farm we look forward to most. Fourteen consecutive seasons buys you a shorthand. We know which of their farms suit us. They know what we're after. Nobody has to start the conversation from scratch each January.
Read the full Bonilla family producer story →
The mill that helped start a revolution
Don Mayo was established in 2003 by Hector Bonilla and his sons, which makes it one of the oldest micromills in Costa Rica. That date is worth pausing on.
For most of the twentieth century, Costa Rican coffee went one way. Farmers grew cherry, delivered it to a large cooperative mill, and got paid the going rate. Whatever made a particular farm special disappeared into the blend somewhere between the hopper and the warehouse. Then, in the early 2000s, a handful of families did something quietly radical. They bought their own depulpers, built their own drying patios and started processing their own coffee. A good lot could now be tasted, named and sold as itself, and the value stayed with the people who grew it.
That's the micromill revolution in a sentence, and Don Mayo was there at the beginning. Pablo Bonilla runs things today, third generation, having learned the craft alongside his father. The mill processes cherry from the family's own farms and buys from neighbouring growers to release as separate micro-lots, so the Bonillas oversee everything from picking through to milled green coffee.
Don Mayo has auctioned more than 35 lots through the Costa Rica Cup of Excellence and taken first place twice, in 2009 with a natural Catuai and again in 2020 with a honey-processed Geisha that scored 90.27.
La Ladera
La Ladera is Pablo's farm, 20 hectares in Tarrazú sitting between 1,850 and 1,900 metres. Look out from the higher plots and you'll see the Pirrís hydroelectric dam below.
Sustainability here is plumbing and planting. Native species go in alongside the coffee to keep the ecology in balance. Wastewater is treated rather than dumped. During peak harvest, a small hydroelectric plant helps power the operation. At the mill, water use is kept tight in line with government restrictions, and coffee pulp and parchment are put back to work as fuel for the dryers and as fertiliser. Almost nothing leaves as waste.
The team matters just as much. La Ladera takes on 120 to 130 pickers each harvest, most of them travelling from Panama, and the same core group has been coming back for the best part of two decades. Transport and accommodation are provided. Farms in this region compete hard for skilled pickers every season, and you can taste the difference between cherry picked by people who know the farm and cherry picked by people passing through.
Just the Catuai this year
La Ladera's range of elevations lets the Bonillas match varietal to altitude. Catuai does its best work in the higher plots, Caturra sits happily in the middle and lower sections.
The first lots we received from La Ladera were a mixture of both Catuai and Caturra, but over the last two years the varietals were separated at the mill, so what you've got in your hands is purely the high-grown Catuai. We're pleased about this, and not only for the traceability. Catuai has a reputation as coffee's dependable workhorse, the sensible hybrid of Mundo Novo and Caturra that Brazil planted by the million because it's compact, productive and hard to upset. Reliable rather than thrilling, is the usual verdict.
Push it up to 1,850 metres, though, and something else happens. Slow cherry development at altitude gives you denser beans and a good deal more acidity than Catuai's press cuttings suggest.
Read our full guide to the Catuai varietal →
Honey, the Costa Rican way
Costa Rica came to honey processing out of necessity, then made it a national specialty.
When an earthquake knocked out water supplies during harvest in the late 2000s, producers who relied on washed processing suddenly couldn't wash anything. Some of them took inspiration from Brazil and Ethiopia, left the sticky mucilage on the bean and dried it anyway. The coffee came out well. Within a few years, honey processing had gone from emergency measure to one of the big three methods, and Costa Rica had made it its own.
The method sits neatly between washed and natural. The skin comes off the cherry, but the sugar-rich mucilage stays on through drying, which asks a lot of whoever is managing the patios. Leave it alone too long and it clumps and over-ferments. Turn it too often and you lose the sweetness you were after in the first place. Don Mayo uses a mechanical demucilager to control precisely how much of that layer stays put, then dries on concrete patios and beds with constant attention. This is a mill that won a Cup of Excellence with a honey lot. They know where the line is.
What you get for all that effort is the clarity and lift of a washed coffee, with the syrupy body and sweetness of a natural sitting underneath it.
Read our guide to honey and pulped natural processing →
Traceability
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Country: Costa Rica
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Region: Tarrazú
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Zone: Los Santos
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Farm: La Ladera
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Farm size: 20 hectares
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Micromill: Don Mayo
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Producer: Pablo Bonilla
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Elevation: 1,850 to 1,900 m.a.s.l.
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Variety: Catuai
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Processing method: Honey
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Relationship since: 2012
Cupping scores
Cupping notes: Peach, brown sugar, strawberry.
Cup of Excellence Cupping Scores
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Clean Cup: 6/8
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Sweetness: 6.5/8
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Acidity: 6/8
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Mouthfeel: 6/8
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Flavour: 6.5/8
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Aftertaste: 6.5/8
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Balance: 6.5/8
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Overall: 6/8
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Correction: +36
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Total: 86/100
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.
Roasting information
Medium: through the gap and don't let this go too far towards second, let the simple sweetness shine.
