In 2012, Claudia Vanessa Rivera founded La Virgen with her husband with a vision of bettering the environment and local community. They produce high quality coffee with responsible practices on their 40-hectare farm and generate wealth not only for their own plantation but for the workers and the surrounding community.
The farm is in Las Nubes community of Jinotega in Northern Nicaragua at an altitude of 1,270 meters. In addition to Caturra and Catuai, they have small experimental microlots planted with java, pacamara, maracaturra, maragogype, and gesha varieties. They manage every aspect of production with their own wet and dry mill for microlots, and have extremely exacting standards for quality, inspecting and performing quality control at every point. This has helped them grow from producing only 53 bags their first year to now producing 575 bags per year.
We collaborated with Claudia Rivera and CISA (our sibling company in Nicaragua) to create a special estate lot of La Virgen specifically for Mercon Specialty. This creates the classic Nicaraguan flavor profile of bight acidity, clean, sweet coffee, with the exceptional quality we expect from a producer like La Virgen.
