Café Britt

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This entry is a little bit out of order because we went to Café Britt last week, but things had to slow down a bit to have enough time to get it posted. Café Britt is one of the top export brands of coffee in Costa Rica, and their coffee tour is one of the top tourist attractions in the country as well. It is an entertaining, informative and hands-on coffee experience. Since coffee is Costa Rica's primary export product, this tour (or another coffee tour) should be on everyone's itinerary when they visit Costa Rica. Our Café Britt guide, Mario, handed out chocolate covered coffee beans to everyone before starting to explain the ins and outs of coffee growing and production. He was joined after a few minutes by the plantation owner (an actor/tour guide playing that role) who helped Mario to bounce back and forth between English and Spanish throughout the entire tour and coffee tasting demonstration. In our tour group, there were people from Argentina, Puerto Rico, North Carolina and Oregon, along with our bunch from Arkansas, so information was repeated equally in Spanish and in English. At one point, Laura was chosen to go into the field and search for a ripe coffee bean (beans are green now and will turn red to be picked in December and January). Check out the pictures to see the monster coffee bean she found! At the coffee tasting demonstration, Whitney was chosen to learn some of the fine points of coffee tasting. We got pictures AND video of her learning to slurp her coffee like a real Café Britt coffee taster. After the tour, we had time to buy some coffee and other products and were treated to a Costa Rican gourmet buffet lunch before returning to San Joaquín.

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Photos

ASU Group at Café Britt
We posed for a group photo before the tour.

Pre-Tour Fun
Laura and Whitney had fun with some of the pre-tour props.

Starting the Tour
Alysse, Kayla, Hailie, Stephen and John listen to the beginning of the tour.

In the Coffee Fields
Kayla, Alysse, Whitney and Brayden during the coffee fields part of the tour.

What a Coffee Bean!
Look at the enormous coffee bean Laura found!

Group During Demonstration
Stephen wasn't looking and Erica was taking a picture, but this was our group right before the tasting demonstration.

Inconspicuous
I tried to be inconspicuous when taking this photo, but the actors noticed me and posed for a comic moment.

Old-Fashioned
They demonstrated the old-fashioned method of brewing coffee in Costa Rica.

Coffee Tasting
Whitney was chosen to participate in the coffee tasting demonstration. The young guy was from North Carolina.

Slurp it, Whitney!
Whitney was too polite to let loose with a big slurping sound.

Free Samples
After the tour, we got to try free samples of all kinds of coffee and chocolates.