A Family With A Purpose
When I was 27 years old, I had an Epiphany. I was working in an industry where I was making a positive impact on the quality of life of my patients on a daily basis, but there was something missing. I needed more, and I had the realization that life is too short to not be smiling. I immediately, began a three year long journey to find what was missing, and to fill that void.
When I was 30 years old, I found the solution. I decided that I needed my own firsthand experience of the “Pura Vida” lifestyle, so I purchased a small hotel in the coastal village of Puerto Viejo, Costa Rica in front of the Caribbean Sea. I sold everything I had in Vermont, packed up some shorts and flip flops and moved to Costa Rica. I dove in full heartedly to my new life in Costa Rica, and never looked back.
About
To The Hemp Explosion…
I knew that I needed more than just a hotel. So soon thereafter, I started to expand by building a bar/restaurant and eventually my craft brewery in a shipping container which I named BriBri Springs Brewery after the farm I own in the jungle which has spring water gushing out of the rainforest. This is the water that I use to brew my beer. It is on this same farm that I obtained my first introduction to cultivating Cacao.
Making chocolate in my chocolate forest quickly became a passion of mine, while I worked alongside the various indigenous groups of the area. I learned about the cacao cultivation and production techniques they’ve been using for thousands of years. The indigenous tribe of the BriBri consider cacao to be a sacred plant and hold it in such high regards that it is positioned alongside their God Sibö. They introduced me to their ceremonial grade cacao, and I knew that I was in the right place!
Fast forward 16 years and my son, who was born in Costa Rica, decided to become a Vermonter and lead me back home to my birthplace just in time to join in on the Hemp explosion of 2019. I planted 21,000 hemp plants that year. With help from a small group of friends, we cultivated, harvested, dried, and extracted our harvest all in house using an organic certified lipid extraction technique to create the USDA organic certified CBD products you’ve come to know and trust through my company named Pura Vida Botanicals. This seed to shelf business model allows me to maintain complete control of every aspect of production and quality control throughout the entire process.
Pura Vida Botanicals has become one of the only legal cannabis companies in the country of Costa Rica.
With import permits and individual product registries. This completes my goal of bringing my medicine back to Costa Rica to help the Ticos with my herbal medication.
Coffee, Cannabis and Cacao
Two years ago, I purchased my coffee farm in the Highlands of Atenas, Costa Rica. Atenas is considered to have one of the best living and coffee growing climates on the planet and produces some of the best coffee available.
Last year we began our transition to organic coffee farming practices. We are producing all of our own organic fertilizers and pesticides on our farm and are working towards obtaining, our organic certification when the transition period of three years expires.
I’m extremely proud of the coffee we are producing and the techniques we use to make our coffee stand out above the rest. One of these techniques is the famed honey technique where the pulp of the coffee fruit remains stuck to the bean for a quick fermentation, and then sun-dried so that the coffee bean absorbs the honey flavor from the pulp of the
fruit. This results in an extremely smooth cup of coffee, with a very slight bitterness, which allows the honeyed notes of the coffee fruit to shine through. Most coffee growers immediately discard 90% of the harvest and only keep the coffee bean, or seed. At Pura Vida Botanicals we use it all.
All of the organic by-products from the farm go back into our red worm beds to create a rich organic fertilizer that we use for many applications in our Cannabis, Coffee and Cocoa…. The three C’s!
We put a lot of time, care, and passion into everything we do, and all the crops we cultivate. I know that immediately upon trying the products we produce you will notice the difference and hopefully come back again and again, becoming a lifetime member of our Pura Vida family.
Thank you for being our customer and please reach out if you have any comments or suggestions. We run this business like a big family and would love to hear from you.
JT Ficociello
