Where does your coffee come from?


Advertisement
Panama's flag
Central America Caribbean » Panama » Chiriquí » Boquete
August 21st 2012
Published: August 22nd 2012
Edit Blog Post

From the drive thru of Dunkin Donuts

From behind the shiny counter of Starbucks or your Keurig of course.



I never really gave it much thought before. And if I did, I envisioned Juan Valdez and his burro delivering it.



Boquete is made up of many coffee farms and it is the pride and joy of this area.



Miracle Farm produces some of the finest organic coffee for the world. The owner is a witty man whose ingenuity and creativity has made him well known in the coffee community of Europe, Africa and Asia. The owner Tito gave up college for his dream of making great coffee. Since coffee plants take 5 years to grow berries, he could not get a bank to give him a loan, to jumpstart his dream. So he bought some used broken equipment and took apart his one and only car to fix the broken down machines. Twenty years later some of the machines still have the working car parts. (on the roaster you can see the headlamp of the vehicle being used)

Tito planted citrus fruit trees, banana, avocado, and bergamot trees throughout his fields to enhance the taste of his coffee. Chickens fertilize the land and eat the bugs and local snakes clean the base of each plant.

During picking season the local Indians bring their entire families down from the mountains to hand pick the berries for the roasting process. They only have 2 week to do the picking or the coffee goes bad.

The beans are dried outside in the sun and then roasted for 3 flavors Americano, Robusto and espresso. Americano coffee has the highest concentration of caffeine and espresso the least amoun­­t. So for those of you who pay the extra two dollars for a shot of espresso, well you are just wasting your hard earned cash.

Most of the beans are sold to large coffee companies unroasted. But the beans that are roasted are sold for anywhere between $90 to $400 dollars a bag.

His $400 bags are special as the bean is first eaten by that anteater looking animal depicted in a previous blog. The animal is calld a kopiluuak. Once the animal digests the beans and well you know what happens next, then the beans are handpicked from the ground, cleaned and roasted for a special rich flavor.



This expensive coffee gives new meaning to the word ‘processed’ but it was oh so delicious to drink.


Additional photos below
Photos: 13, Displayed: 13


Advertisement

The carThe car
The car

that was sacrificed for a dream
dry beansdry beans
dry beans

can only have moisture of 12%
roasting processroasting process
roasting process

bicycle chain reinvented
RoastingRoasting
Roasting

headlamp from the car in use


Tot: 0.075s; Tpl: 0.011s; cc: 9; qc: 49; dbt: 0.0453s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1; ; mem: 1.1mb