Coffee Tours Versus Coffee Farming in Costa Rica

Looking out over the coffee fields.

I’d be lying if I said I went to Costa Rica for the coffee, but I was pretty excited to be visiting this land of coffee on my vacation. My wife and I spent eight days taking in the countryside, — not a lot of time in which to see this beautiful country, but it was all we could stand to be away from our one year old son.

I had been warned in the guidebooks and travel blogs that it is nearly impossible to get a good cup of coffee regardless of Costa Rica’s world-famous reputation for producing great coffee. I arrived with low expectations but also excitement to visit a coffee farm. If I can be so bold as to make a generalization about the coffee across an entire country, as the guidebooks do, the coffee was… not great, but not awful either. It was infinitely better than the watery brew I had on the airplane back to the States. From region to region the coffee was pretty consistent; dark roast and finely ground. The coffee I was served was usually thick and strong. I’m thinking that the roast and the grind were the equalizing factors here.

The one exception was the cup served after the coffee tour at El Trapiche, a coffee and sugar farm near the Monteverde cloud forest. That coffee will probably be the freshest I’ll ever taste — from plant to cup in only a few days. The dark roast made it difficult for me to pick out individual flavors but the freshness added a lot of wonderful body and some subtle fruitiness in the background.

In planning our trip I had looked at information on the most popular coffee tours in Costa Rica but decided I would see what options we encountered as we traveled. Finding a coffee tour was like finding Starbucks in New York City – you don’t really have to look. I put my faith in the owner of the hotel we stayed at in Santa Elena, near Monteverde, and he sent us to the El Trapiche Coffee and Sugar Cane Tour. It is a small, 60 acre farm that has been described as making more money from their tours than from their coffee. Our guide, Jorge was unclear as to whether El Trapiche exported coffee to the United States.

I was excited to walk around a real coffee farm but had no expectations about what it would be like. Jorge was well versed in the high art of tourism. He was an entertainer; he knew how to play the crowd. But his banter was also highly informative. I knew nothing about the process of growing coffee previous to the El Trapiche tour, and it definitely served to put together some pieces of the process and clarify some terminology I had been vaguely familiar with.

About ten minutes into the tour we stopped to admire and photograph a sleeping sloth in a tree along the path. This was Costa Rica, after all. As we made our way to the coffee fields the smell of roasting coffee drifted through the air. Jorge quickly rerouted the tour for us to catch a roasting session, which was just ending as we got there. The roasting took place in a small, mostly open, building with other bean processing equipment lining one of the walls. They were currently roasting… yes, you guessed it… dark roast.

We resumed the tour, heading back up to the coffee fields. Up and up… and down. Hills are the standard in Costa Rica. The only flatland in the country is the local soccer fields.

Ripe coffee cherries ready to be picked.

At El Trapiche, you can’t see the coffee plants for more than a few rows because the hills drop off so steeply. I could imagine hardy, athletic pickers walking those hills to harvest the beans. Coffee pickers work to fill a sixteen-inch-round by sixteen-inch-deep basket. A full basket of ripe coffee cherries without stems or imperfections will get a picker two dollars. Jorge headed off our delusions of injustice, informing us that a top picker can earn $60 a day toiling from sunup to sundown — good money in Costa Rica. He then flatly stated the wage is mandated by the government.

Coffee cherries in the pickers basket.

We picked a few cherries, squishing them between our fingers and sucking the skin to verify for ourselves that they had no coffee flavor before being roasted. Looking into the cherries was the most interesting part of the tour for me. Jorge pointed out how the ripe cherries had a healthy red glow at their peak, yet all of the red ones looked the same to me.

The next thing he noted was shape. Jorge performed a little magic trick, naming the number of beans that each cherry contained before revealing the answer with a twist of his fingers. His well-trained eye never missed. His guide was the shape of the coffee cherry. Round cherries contain a single bean, oval ones two beans, and the flat ones house 3 beans. Coffee cherries with two beans are the norm. Three beans don’t taste any different. One bean is of course otherwise known as the revered peaberry. Jorge didn’t hesitate to contribute to the myth of the peaberry, offering an explanation of why these singletons were the best: they receive all of the flavor of the cherry instead of sharing it with a sibling.

Bean sorting and grading.

From the fields we went back into the shed we had observed the roasting and went through the line of processing equipment to see how the layers of the cherry were removed and how the beans were sorted out or graded. Grading was done by a machine which allows differing sized beans to drop through a honeycombed metal grate so the same beans end up together. The company divides its coffee into peaberry, first, second, and third, with peaberry and first grade coffee picked off for export. Peaberry beans separate out because of their round shape and first grade beans separated out due to their larger size and more regular shape.

Green coffee beans on drying racks.

The last stop on the tour was a large room with several long tables, chairs and a small kitchen in the corner. Here we were served a small sample of a traditional dish, homemade lemonade, and of course coffee — freshly roasted coffee.

The current owner, Juan de Dios Santamaria Hidalgo roasting coffee.

I decided to buy a bag of coffee and bring it home to see what it would be like ground less finely and made in a french press. I usually prefer a medium roast but they had only dark roast and light. It cost $5 for about 12 ounces. I was unsure how it would travel the 2500 miles back to my kitchen in its thin clear plastic packaging, and my fears turned out to be well-founded: from here on out the most pleasure I received from that coffee was in opening my backpack at successive destinations. With each day the smell of the beans grew fainter. Ten days later I was at home and ready to grind, but the coffee aroma was gone.

The El Trapiche coffee tour was worthwhile and enjoyable, however until they invest in foil bags with degassing valves to package their coffee in, I would recommend sticking to the coffee they serve you at the end of the tour.

Tags: Coffee Farm Tour, Costa Rica Coffee Farm

Category: Coffee Information