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- Robert and Rick
Robert's Blog - 2/2/10 - Costa Rica January 2010
2/3/201010:41:54 AM Link 0 comments | Add comment
I traveled to Costa Rica in January to more fully understand the coffee growing and milling process. I was able to see the huge difference that a focus on quality has on coffee.My first stop was a large, traditional mill, one of the largest in Costa Rica. This mill processes hundreds of thousands of pounds of coffee each day. With that much coffee being processed, it’s difficult if not impossible to trace the coffee that this mill is processing and exporting back to the farm where it was grown, called “traceability.” The coffee beans that this mill processes through the wet and dry process are gathered at different receiving stations throughout the region, with each of the farmers getting paid at that point. This is the only option for many of the coffee farms in Costa Rica, as they don’t own or have access to micro-mills to process their coffee. As a result, their coffee, which may have some amazing characteristics, is combined with other farmer’s coffee beans, and as a result, the quality of the coffee in the cup could be damaged.I was also able to visit the Las Lajas farm in Alajuela. This farm and micro-mill is owned by the Chacon family (Oscar and Francisca). It was amazing to see the difference between this small mill and the large commercial mill. Since the Chacons own the ecological mill, they are able to control quality throughout every step until the coffee is given to the distributor for export. Also, the Las Lajas farm has many more manual processes, such as patio drying, raised screens for drying the coffee, and the ability (and desire) to use many different drying processes for their coffee. The farm is also certified organic, requiring much more work to maintain the quality of the farm. The larger, commercial mill employed approximately 60 people and processed approximately 200 times the coffee that Las Lajas does with only 12 people.Since the harvest season is from November to March, we were able to observe ripe coffee “cherries” and participate in picking some of the ripe beans. This was an amazing experience seeing how beautiful their farm (100% organic) is compared with some of the other farms in the area. Their farm has true shade-grown coffee, as opposed to other farms that only have a few shade trees to be able to make the claim of “shade-grown coffee.” It was amazing to me how difficult and pain-staking the picking of beans can be, with a basket wrapped around your waste for ten hours per day, six days per week for up to four months of the year. My pickings in about 45 minutes yielded just under $1.00 pay. I am told that the best pickers pick the equivalent pay of about $20 per day in Costa Rica.I would highly recommend a trip to a coffee growing region, or if anyone is traveling to a coffee growing region for pleasure, to make time to tour a farm and have the coffee growing and harvesting process explained to them.Below are several pictures from my trip. As you can see, there was a little time for fun on a zip-line through the Costa Rica rain forest canopy!Enjoy!!!
Large commercial processing mill
Time for fun!!!
Dry/natural process (leaving cherry on)
Pulp Natural / "Honey coffee" process
Natural screen-drying with help of Oscarita
The day's harvest
Las Lajas Ecological Farm
Coffee fermenting (part of wet process)
De-pulping the cherries (part of wet process)
Hand-sorting out the "floaters"
Oscar Chacon explaining the family's 100% organic farm
Ripe cherries ready for picking
All the roots live on the surface in an organic farm
Green bean with mucilage (fruit) and skin
My pickings with the Chacon children
Real shade-grown farm versus pseudo shade-grown on other side of river
Rows and rows of coffee trees
The Chacon family
Arenal volcano – 1 of 10 most active in the world