Many years ago, like most coffee farmers in Costa Rica, Ricardo Perez was selling his annual harvest to the large regional mill in the West Valley and watching his beautifully farmed Villalobos and Caturra cherries disappear into a sea of anonymous blended coffee. This was the way things worked at that time in Costa Rica: Coffee farmers brought their crop to whatever large mill was closest to their farm, received payment, and then turned around and went back to their farms, never knowing exactly where or how their coffee would end up. While this regionally blended coffee was always considered fairly good, many people suspected that some phenomenal coffees were being lost in the regional mix.