Coffee Tour

What is one of the things Costa Rica is known for? Coffee! And they have pretty good one. Monteverde with its high elevation supposedly has good climate to grow coffee. That's why we decided to take a coffee tour. We visited a local farmer, belonging to an organic co-op of about 12 farms. They each harvest their coffee and process it at the same mill.

This is a coffee plant. Here the flower. Late April is the blooming time, harvest is from November through February.

Still, there were some berries left.

This is the bean inside the berry, which would later be dried, roasted and packed.
As each farm is fairly small and they don't only want to rely on coffee so they grow all sorts of fruit ranging from mangoes, to paypays and bananas (here a banana flower)......to sugar cane. In this old press (I am sure they use machines for bigger scale pressing) the juice is extracted from the sugar canes. This juice can be boiled down in order to get crystal sugar or is the base for rum!We got to drink some of the juice, it was extremely sweet. That's a pile of "empty" sugar canes.After visiting the actual plantation we went the mill. Unfortunately we missed the harvest time and everything we learned at there was more theory than practise. We got to see all the (sleeping) machines and they described the whole process of extracting the beans from the berries, washing, drying, roasting (if coffee is exported, it's actually roasted in the destination country), packaging (by hand as it's such small coop), the use of the remaining berry shells (fertilizer), what to do with the non-Grade A berries etc. We learned how much coffee one plant can carry per season, how much one picker can pick in a day (10 boxes per day), how much he earns ($2 per box), for how much the coffee is sold ($5 per box)- all other numbers I forgot already.