It’s no secret that a good cup comes from a good crop. Even the best roasters in the world – yes exactly, like Single O’s Ed, Stu and Dan – are at the mercy of the quality of the green bean. Which is why, along with meeting sustainability criteria, rewarding with fair prices, supporting a range of producer organisations including entrepreneurial individuals, co-ops and progressive estates, and buying to meet our desired flavour profiles, we meticulously search for high quality.Now cutting to this ‘chute and shoot business. Earlier this year, just in the knick of time before the global pandemic, we travelled to La Minita Costa Rica, with our legendary café customers Berkelo and Bread & Butter and wicked film-maker Benemac. La Minita has the quality benchmarks (not to mention stunning backdrop) to film a little flick about how specialty coffee is grown, and to feature some of their latest harvest in our ‘just add hot water’ Coffee Parachutes.Without further delay, here’s the film… (See you in around 4 minutes.)As the drone footage showed, La Minita is located on high altitude eastern facing slopes in the Tarrazú region. They pay exacting attention to their plant nutrition and farm husbandry, they’re leaders not only when it comes to their environmental practices, but also how they treat their people – something that Single O stands strongly for.As you saw in the film, growing coffee comes with its own challenges, but add a global pandemic on top with ever-changing circumstances, and the results can be crushing for producers. Right now the team at La Minita are having to adapt the way they operate to ensure they comply with the Government’s new infrastructure guidelines and regulations, as well as working out how to help their usual coffee pickers who are now no longer able to cross land borders from Nicaragua or Panama.In response to the latest restrictions, La Minita’s Vice President Scott Merle explains that “there has been a huge push this Summer to encourage Costa Ricans displaced from jobs to sign up to pick coffee” and that so far the initiative has been successful in filling 50 per cent of roles. With things constantly changing, they’re keeping their fingers on the pulse and adapting as they can.While it looks like we won’t be able to visit La Minita for a while, we hope you enjoy the li’l film we shot there and had the chance to try the latest delicious La Minita harvest in our Parachutes, for a specialty brew on the fly.