Visit to Coffee Plantation

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While Alex was here in Guatemala, we spent 3 days in Antigua, Guatemala. One of those afternoons we spent at the Filadelfia Coffee Plantation just outside of town. In this blog, I will share with you the process of coffee growing, picking, drying, and processing right down the the final product: that perfect cup of coffee! Again, my internet connection won't allow me to upload pictures to the blog, but you can follow along with photos of the whole coffee making process by going to: http://www1.snapfish.com/snapfish/thumbnailshare/AlbumID=3290559016/a=3029341/

The Filadelfia Finca (named that way because in Greek Philadelphia (or however they would spell it - it's all Greek to me!) means place of brotherly love, not because of the city in the USA) picked us up in Antigua in one of their fancy if bouncy coffee plantation trucks. The plantation itself is gorgeous and hosts a hotel as well as several restaurants. In addition to growing coffee, they also have a ton of land that cannot be used for coffee growing as it is too high up and the flavor of coffee grown up in the hills is not the flavor they (or we) are after. So they have horseback riding, zip line canopy tours, mountain biking, and all kinds of other adventurous things, which we did not do. We were strictly there for the coffee tour.

We had a great guide named Karla who gave us a 2 hour tour of the Finca Filadelfia (finca is "farm"). She started out by showing us the coffee plants and explaining that there are 2 kinds of coffee plants that grow in Latin America: the "robust" and the "Arabica". Arabica coffee, which most of us drink on a daily basis, gives a moderate flavor with mild acidity. That's the flavor and acidity that Antigua coffee is known for. But there is a problem. The roots of the Arabica plant are very susceptible to bugs found in the regional soil, and therefore it is hard to grow Arabica plants sucessfully. So what the Finca Filadelfia does is splices the roots of the robust coffee plant and the tops of the Arabica plants into a kind of hybrid. The roots of the robust plant are much heartier and less affected by these bugs. This makes it so the roots are of the robust plant, and the part of the plant where the coffee beans grow is of the Arabica plant. It still yields a 100% Arabica coffee, but with a much higher success rate. When you see the picture of the baby coffee plants, note that each of this plants has been spliced into a hybrid by hand. There are over 50,000 of such plants currently growing at the Filadelfia coffee plantation. The other difference between robust coffee and Arabica coffee is the caffeine content. The robust variety has a higher caffeine content than they want for Antigua coffee, which is the other reason they splice the Arabica top onto the root of the robust, to get the Arabica's caffeine content rather than that of the robust.

Once the plants are big enough to yield coffee beans, these beans need to ripen. When they are ripe, they are a bright cherry red on the outside. The outside skin is almost like a soft nut and yields the red color. Once the beans are ripe, they are each hand-picked, one at a time in order to not damage the plant itself. There is no mechanization at all in this process, and people from all over Guatemala come to live at the plantation and work the harvest. They are paid based on the amount of coffee beans they can pick in a day. It's generally not a bad job in terms of pay here in Guatemala, although it is certainly difficult. People can pick up to 100 lbs of coffee beans in a single day if they are experienced in doing so. When the coffee beans are ripe you can squeeze the skin and out pops the coffee bean. It's slimy, hard, and doesn't taste or smell like coffee at all. We sucked on some of them and they don't taste like anything but sliminess.

After the coffee beans have been picked, they go into a wet mill where the good ones are sorted from the bad (maybe not ripe yet, maybe just no good) ones by gravity. They are tossed into water and the bad ones float and are skimmed out by hand. The keepers are then shucked by a machine which removes that cherry colored skin from the bean itself. The beans are then set out in the sun to dry. The harvest season largely coincides with the dry season here in Guatemala so rain isn't so much of a threat, but if it does rain, they have to be covered or brought inside until the weather makes a turn for the better. This can delay the drying process and threaten a crop, and all the hard work that comes into play before they are set out to dry. The beans are then sent through a conveyor belt where experienced individuals hand-pick out which ones they think should not be included in a bag of coffee. The belt moves pretty fast and you really have to know what you are doing! We got to try our hand at this. Finally, the raw (unroasted) coffee beans are packed up mostly for export. The Finca also has a small roastery for companies who prefer to buy already roasted beans, but most of their coffee goes to companies that have their own roasteries and prefer to do this work themselves. If you buy Antigua Guatemala coffee at Starbucks, there is a good chance it is from Finca Filadelfia who exports to them in the States.

In order to determine which batches of coffee should be exported, or kept for internal Guatemalan consumption, or used to make instant coffee, coffee testers smell the unroasted beans and make their determination. This happens for each batch of coffee beans. FINALLY, after all of this, we got to taste some of the plantation's delicious coffee. All in all, a lot more than we think about on a daily basis goes into a single cup of coffee. A lot of hard work and time are put in so that we can enjoy that smooth, Arabica coffee each morning!

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