We woke up before our Alarm, but started the day slowly, heading to breakfast around 6:30am. It was pouring with rain, and showed no signs of slowing, so we decided to spend the day relaxing in our very comfortable room. I downloaded a novel on my Kindle while Manja posted her instagram and worked up the first few pictures from our trip.
A short clip of the rain, so you can get a real feel for it 🙂
At around 10 we decided that we would get going regardless of weather. Our original plan was to hit the waterfall and swimming hole “La Fortuna” at 7am to beat the crowds, given that it was a 300m walk to the entry from our hotel. But with the torrential downpour we changed our plan into visiting the North fields coffee plantation. There’s a fair few coffee plantations and tours in Costa Rica, so we decided to trust the reviews and hit one of the smaller ones which was also nearby. They offer a tour about their coffee/cocoa farm and based on our experience at Charlies in Queensland we thought it may be good to do this with a family-run provider. And it totally was! I had forgotten a bunch of the info about cocoa and learned a bunch about coffee.
The following paragraphs are a bit philosophical about coffee, environment and what is ultimately “The right thing to do”. I’ve indented it so that the less politically/environmentally interested of you can just skip right past it all.
Importantly, I was educated about the difficulty of proper organic farming for coffee, and about some of the problems with the fair-trade options. Basically fair-trade is important in countries where exploitation is rife, but it creates a problem in other places where a certification causes large amounts of extra expense with no actual benefit to consumers or suppliers. Given Costa Rica, as many other countries, does not have an issue with exploitation, single origin becomes much more meaningful.
As for organic: it basically is a risk premium. The farmer takes greater risk of having their livelihood destroyed by things like treatable and common fungus, and receives a premium for this effort. This is not, by any means, the same as being sustainable as infection by fungus such as “Rust disease” is almost inevitable in humid countries, which also happen to be the countries where coffee grows.
One other alternative is to grow more hardy crops: entirely possible. There is a type of non-aribica coffee plant which have higher yield and better resistance, which is commonly used in other countries. It happens to be illegal in Costa Rica because it produces terrible quality coffee.
In general there seems to be a great interest by farmers to be more organic, but without the ability to control diseases which can literally wipe out their livelihood in a matter of months, they just can’t afford to take the risk. I mean, if you bought a house and had to choose: Damage the environment or risk it being destroyed every 12 months, would you do it? I doubt I know a single person who would risk actual bankruptcy for the principle of living organically.
But guess who can? That’s right: Big corporations. So if you’re buying fair-trade organic coffee you definitely are paying a premium, but probably not for what you think you are, as you are supporting some large corporation and not smaller farmers. The corporation can afford to hire people to make sure that each certifications stringent check-list is followed. Best case there is no loophole in the certification process, but I personally doubt such a checklist exists.
So how do you make sure you buy coffee which is sustainable, farmed by local farmers, without the use of pesticides or environmentally damaging impacts? The answer is simple: At present you can’t. Best you can do is pick your evil, either support a large corporation which will follow the letters of the law when it comes to things that must be done to be certified (Fair trade and/or Organic) or support local farmers who are still forced to use pesticides to survive (Single Origin)
One of the nice things about the tour was that we got to try freshly made chocolate (including the traditional “Drink of the gods”) as well as freshly roasted coffee. Being there to learn I also asked to taste the absolutely burned coffee beans, just to know what I would taste when a bean tastes burnt.
One massive take-away: Always buy whole beans and grind them yourself. What to look for in terms of quality: Beans of similar size and colour, a recent “Roasted on” date, not many broken beans. Ground coffee is almost always inferior quality. If coffee tastes exactly the same all the time its probably not the best quality either. I assume its the same as any other product I know: If you control for consistency you tend to do this by suppressing high quality rather than by eliminating low quality. (Think about it: if you alway try and hit average quality you eliminate the truly good things to offset the really bad ones. Wouldn’t it be better to just eliminate the bad ones, even if this affects your yield?).
Needless to say, I loved the tour and would highly recommend it!
Being all coffee-d up (I had the shakes, and I very rarely get the shakes), we decided to walk off our energy by visiting the “Las Fortuna Waterfall”. The rain had eased to a very light drizzle, and we could walk it with just our rain jackets to keep the moisture at bay. Usually you can swim at the base, but with the rainfall of the past few weeks, the flow was dangerously strong so swimming was not allowed. The good news, however, was that it wasn’t as busy because of this. We got to enjoy the sight and sound of the waterfall in reasonable peace.
By the time we had climbed back to the top we were both hungry, so decided to try out a well-reviewed Pizza place called “Cafe Mediterraneo”. The reviews were right and we were not disappointed, freshly made wood-oven pizza with a crispy base. Absolutely delicious! We even got to watch a rather spectacular sunset over the volcano from our table 🙂 After dinner we drove back to the hotel, where I wrote this little blog post and coffee rant 😉
thanks for the new insides on coffee!