Iván Gerardo Solís Rivera has been dedicated to everything coffee for over 20 years. This includes coffee growing, processing and quality control. He worked for years at two of the largest milling operations in the country before starting his Café Solis & Cordero project with his family, founding their own dry mill in 2018.

A certified Q-grader since 2009, he has spent the last decade or so experimenting with innovative processing techniques.

Solis & Cordero Micromill was founded in 2018 by the Solís Cordero family to help support smallholders in the Santos region. The mill provides a variety of services including cherry processing, selling specialty coffee to international destinations, selling roasted coffee in Costa Rica, consulting on processing and quality control, and export services. For smallholders working with Solis & Cordero, the mill helps them differentiate their coffee by maintaining farm-level traceability and by using innovative, quality-focused processing methods to further improve coffee.

In this Black Honey process cherries are fermented in piles for 48 hours, then washed with clean water, pulped put in tanks for a short time before placed on the drying beds in the sun. After drying on beds the coffee is finished in mechanical dryers at a maximum temperature of 45 degrees until they reach 10% Humidity.