Coffee tour and how to learn swear words in Spanish

 

Last week we took a trip to learn about another of Costa Rica’s important agricultural crops: coffee!  We took a long and winding but gorgeous bus ride through the mountains south of San José (thank goodness I took Dramamine before leaving…) to arrive in the Valle de los Santos (Valley of the Saints) where there is a fair trade coffee cooperative called Llano Bonito.  The motto of Llano Bonito is “Café con un rostro humano” (Coffee with a human face); there is a huge emphasis on supporting the economic and psychological well-being of the region’s small familial coffee farms.  We visited the processing center, where coffee berries from all of these small farms are collected to be processed into high-quality roasted coffee beans.

We started off our tour with (what else?) a mug of delicious coffee and some fresh fruit.  The coffee was the cooperative’s “Gran Dragon” brand, a medium roast with chocolate-y notes (I’m pretending I’m a coffee connoisseur and know what I’m talking about).   

The berries first pass through the wet process, in which they are washed and the mature berries are separated from the unripe ones.  We visited at the end of the harvest season so farmers were removing all of the fruits from their trees, so there were many unripe berries being processed.  These green berries will still be processed into coffee beans, but they are kept separate because the coffee they produce is of lower quality.  Also in this process, the beans are removed; the pulp and peel of the fruit is saved to be composted and used as fertilizer on the coffee farms.

Mature and unripe coffee berries being separated

After removing the beans, the fruit is collected here to be composted and used as fertilizer

Stirring coffee berries.  This batch is a mixture of about 50% ripe (red) and 50% unripe (green) berries, which will be marketed as lower quality than the 100% ripe batches.

Fresh coffee beans being transported to the dry process

The beans then move to the dry process, in which they are dried in huge ovens, and the thin coating of the beans is removed.  This coating is in turn used to fuel the drying ovens, which allows Llano Bonito to run its processing plant without destroying the rainforest for wood to burn. 

In the final stage of the process, the beans go through an initial sorting by size, and are packed into burlap bags.  They are more carefully sorted at another facility in San José, to ensure that the quality of coffee beans is consistent.

Drying oven

Huge piles of dried coffee beans are stored here to await further processing

Dried and sorted coffee beans, waiting to be shipped to San Jose for further sorting

After leaving Llano Bonito, we drove to visit a women’s cooperative.  Like the Mujeres de Amazilia on the Finmac cacao farm, this cooperative was formed with government assistance to provide rural Costa Rican women with a way to improve their economic status and exert their independence.  This women’s cooperative was formed around the idea of natural healing.  They gave us a demonstration of their services, which involve probing different locations on a patient’s body to determine his or her “bioenergy” and decide what natural medicines, creams, or shampoos they need to use.  It was hard for me, coming from a scientific background, to believe completely in their methods, but it was a very interesting demonstration nonetheless.

View from the women's cooperative

We returned to Llano Bonito to eat delicious lunch #123,3984,213 in Costa Rica, and then were given cappuccinos made with Llano Bonito espresso to sip on as we watched the process of toasting and grinding the coffee beans.

Lunch: corn tortillas, fried plantains, picadillo de chayote, green salad, and the requisite rice and beans

Freshly-toasted coffee beans.  The smell in this room was incredible

The next day, I checked another thing off of my list of must-see things in Costa Rica when I went with a few friends to a soccer game!  Saprissa, the San José team, was playing a game against another province in the national stadium, a huge, brand-new stadium donated to Costa Rica by China several years ago.  We had a great time sitting amongst die-hard Saprissistas, and I think we all learned some new colorful language in Spanish when they were unhappy with a play.  Our only disappointment was that the game was 0-0, so we didn’t get to experience the excitement of a Goooooooooooooooooooooooooolllllllllll!  Maybe next time…

El Estadio Nacional (national stadium)