14 years ago, the word organikos crept into my vocabulary. My family’s company had recently been transformed from an advisory service to a management company. They were one year into the process of establishing protocols for “hospitality with sense and sensibility” and some generalizable principles for entrepreneurial conservation.

In the summer of 2003, having focused for the previous four years on rainforest conservation in the Osa Peninsula of Costa Rica, leveraging the economics of lodging and guided nature immersions, my family moved to France, to live in the 14th arrondissement of Paris. My brother and I would learn a new language and my parents would plan out a new business for when we returned to Costa Rica. They used organikos as a codeword for that future initiative. The initiative would provide the tastes–from beverages, spices, foods–associated with the places they had been working in recent years; it would provide those tastes as pre-experience of those places. Most obvious was coffee from Costa Rica.

There were small experiments over the years since then, starting with a single estate coffee from Costa Rica’s Tarrazu region; then wine from the Croatian island of Hvar; then monsooned coffee from the Malabar coast of India.

Now my parents are planning their move back from India to our home in Costa Rica. And I am planning to spend the next couple years in graduate school. We are talking about Organikos again, and it looks like the time is right to formally launch it as a business. I will tell you about that as the idea develops. First, how about some Tarrazu single estate coffee? Hacienda La Minita was a pioneer in single estate coffee, an early inspiration for us in terms of tasting the place, and it continues to be one of our favorites. We can get it to you. And if you want to visit the estate, or get to know any other place in Costa Rica, we can help with that as well.