It's not Costa Rica without coffee...

Another new feature to this year’s Trek Travel Costa Rica trip was a coffee tour. Being the coffee connoisseur (read: addict) that I am, I thought it was a little crazy that we visited a country as famous for it’s coffee as Costa Rica is without so much as a mention of coffee. That would be like visiting Bordeaux or Napa Valley without even mentioning wine.

Monica knew of a coffee company that was located very near the start of our last ride. We stopped in during our FTP to see if it was feasible to do a tour, have a picnic, and start our ride from there. They were willing to do a tour for us so we signed it up. The day we visited they didn’t have time for a tour, so we went into the first trip with little to no idea what to expect of the tour. It turned out to be really sweet! They are working very hard to be as environmentally friendly and organic as possible. Café Diria is a coffee co-op made up of many very small, family run coffee farms. The farmers bring in their beans for processing at the Diria plant.

If your coffee started it's life like this, it's Robusta.

There are two primary types of coffee: Arabica and Robusta. Arabica is the only type of coffee grown in Costa Rica. It is actually illegal to grow Robusta in Costa Rica. There are several drawbacks to Robusta. First, it drains the soil of nutrients. While it produces much larger quantities of coffee per plant, it is a lot harder to sustain the soil where it is grown. The trees are also much larger, making hand picking impossible. While Diria requires all of its coffee to be picked by hand, thus allowing the farmer to pick only the best coffee on each pass through the field, Robusta is picked by machines, eliminating the ability to be discerning in what is picked. The result is an overall lower quality of coffee. Arabica has a much smaller number of cherries per plant, meaning more nutrients, and more taste, go into each coffee bean!

If your coffee started it's life like this, it's Arabica.

All of the coffee that is brought into Diria is picked by hand. This allows the farmers to go down the row of coffee plants and only pick the coffee that is ripe and ready for processing. This results in a higher quality coffee, but requires that the farmer make as many as six or seven passes down the row over the course of a harvest season. When coffee is picked, it is in “cherry” form. The cherry that surrounds the coffee bean is filled with sugar. If the coffee is not processed very quickly from when it is picked, the sugars start to ferment, resulting in a bitter and acidic coffee.

Coffee measuring bins

When farmers bring in their coffee, it is measured as it is unloaded, ensuring each farmer is paid his or her fair share of the profits when Diria sells the coffee on the world market. Currently, about half of Diria’s farms are producing organic coffee. It requires seven years without use of chemicals on the land for the coffee that is grown there to be considered organic. Diria faces the challenge of convincing its farmers that it is worth seven years of lower yields before receiving a slightly higher payout for organic coffee. Once the coffee is measured it is divided into organic and non-organic. The cherries are then washed and soaked in water for a few hours to soften the cherries and to make it easier to extract the bean from the cherry. They are then run through what is essentially a squeezer, that squeezes the bean out of the cherry, the cherries are taken to a large, open air warehouse for storage until their later use (I’ll get back to this). The water used to soak and clean the cherries is pumped down to large holding tanks (I’ll get back to this, too). The beans are sorted by size. The larger the bean, the higher the quality, and the higher the going rate on the world market.

After sorting, the beans are set out to dry. Diria has large concrete patios on which the beans are spread for drying. Sun drying is good for two reasons. First, it doesn’t require the burning of any type of fuel, so no fuel is used, and no pollution is dispatched into the environment. Second, it’s free. It does require constant stirring and turning, but that is a small price to pay for the environmental and economic advantages. High school students are hired for this process during a break from school, which further allows Diria to give back to the local economy. They do use large ovens for final drying, but doing initial drying on the sun patios allows them to use the ovens for three to four hours, instead of over fifty if they went straight into the ovens.

After the final drying, the coffee beans are stored in large bins until the market in Europe or the US is at a good price to sell, or until the next season comes along and they need to make room for the next year’s crop, whichever comes first. When the beans go into the holding bins, they have a husk on them, similar to the husk on a peanut. When the beans are sold, these husks are removed. The husks are stored because they are burned in the final drying ovens instead of using oil or gas powered ovens.

A lot of coffee is shipped to Germany. Nearly all of the decaffeination done in the world is done in Germany. If you’re inclined toward drinking decaf, know that even if you’re in a place where coffee is grown fresh (Costa Rica for example), the decaf you drink has been to Germany and back. The woman who gives our tours said that when people ask for decaf there, she recommends orange juice, because that’s decaf and fresh!

Recognize this? It's a cashew!

The organic farms use a similar approach to anti-pest and anti-disease that is used at Rancho Margot. They plant a lot of other crops in with the coffee to mask the aroma given off by the coffee. Amongst those often planted are citrus fruits, cashews, and hot peppers. This deters pests and disease, as well as giving the farmers another crop to sell throughout the year as an additional source of income. When pesticides are needed, the organic farmers use a natural solution made of things like lemon juice, hot peppers, and water instead of chemicals.

Sedimentation lagoons

I mentioned before that Diria tries not to waste anything from the process. I’ve already talked about how they use the husks from the beans as fuel for the drying ovens. The water that is used for washing the coffee cherries is filled with all kinds of stuff that, before the use of the holding tanks, was pumped directly into the rivers and turned the rivers a lovely shade of green. Now that water is stored in sedimentation pits. There are a series of three pits. After a certain amount of time to settle out in the first one, the water is pumped to the second, and then again to the third. Most of the sugars that were absorbed into the water settle out by this time, but some remains. This water, rather than getting dumped into the river, is pumped to a neighboring farm for use in irrigation. The remaining sugars in the water act as nutrients for his crops. By the end of the dry season all three sedimentation pits are dry, and the sugars that have settled out are dug out of the pits and loaded into trucks to be distributed to the co-op’s farmers as a natural fertilizer.

Discarded cherries

The cherries that are removed from outside the coffee beans are also used. They are put into large troughs that are filled with worms. These worms compost the cherries into extremely rich soil. The soil is used in the greenhouses to start new coffee plants, sent to the farms to enrich the soil, and sold to hotels and offices that use them in the gardens and indoor planting.

Worms!

Diria does its best not to create waste, and turn everything that would normally be considered byproduct into something useful and profitable. It’s a great operation that is a model of what the coffee industry should be all about. Unfortunately, not all coffee plantations offer this high standard of quality, not only in their coffee, but in the standard of treatment of their farmers. Organic and fair trade coffee are the future of what coffee production should be world wide. Supporting companies that strive for high standards of both will make a huge difference for coffee agriculture worldwide.

For more info, check out:

http://www.coocafe.com/coopepilangosta_coffee.htm