coffee picking in Monteverde

Trevor and I have spent the most heavenly day working at a farm in Monteverde picking coffee!

The farm (or rather the land) is actually owned by Quakers, but Finca La Bella is a community project whereby 24 families live in the area and farm the land using the food for themselves, and to sell. The community project has provided the families with basic housing, and electricity that comes from solar power and hydroelectric power. Trevor and I are staying with one of the families, in a small house where the rooms are just partitions that don´t quite reach all the way up to the ceiling. For a reason that I can´t fathom, all of the houses in Monteverde have corrugated iron roofs, which rattle and bang with the continuous wind that blows through the monteverde mountains.

Anyway, you might have heard of Monteverde coffee. Look out for it in the shops, because in a couple of months time, you could be drinking the very coffee that T and I picked!

Whilst I was picking, with the sun shining, the low cloud forming rainbows all around, and monkeys playing in the trees above my head, I considered what an odd relationship some of us (i.e. rich westerners) have with our food. For example, the only form of coffee I have ever seen is the roasted beans. I couldn´t have told you anything about the plant, or what part of it the beans come from. Often, we only know foods that have been processed beyond recognition. For anyone who is as ignorant as me (!!), coffee grows on small trees with leaves that look a bit like laurel leaves. Each tree produces thousands of berries, and when green berries turn yellow, orange or red, they can be picked. Sometimes the beans dry completely on the branches, and turn dark brown, a little more like the coffee beans we are familiar with.

The beans are picked by hand, by pickers who wear wicker baskets held with a circular strap that goes around the waist and then around the front of the basket, fitting under its rim. When the baskets are too heavy with fruit, they are emptied into an enormous white sack. When the 4 of us had filled a sack we finished for the day.

The coffee sacks are sold to the local cooperative, who separate the fruit into 3 groups, the yellow and orange fruits, the red fruits, and finally the dry, browny black ones. They all make different types of coffee, but I understand that the famous monteverde coffee comes from the red ones, that have a sweeter taste.

The fruits are spread out in the sun to dry, and then are passed through a machine that takes the beans out of the fruit. The beans then go into a roaster, and are finally ground into a powder. It´s fascinating!