How It's Made: Coffee

14 de Marzo

On our last full day in Antigua, Guatemala my friends and I took a tour of a coffee farm in a near by pueblo with the company De La Gente, a wonderful cooperative that works with Guatemalan farmers to grow coffee sustainably, reach larger markets, and teach visitors about the coffee making progress.

Our host's husband, Rafael, was kind enough to give us a ride into the town, and the view on the way in was absolutely stunning. Quaint street between brightly colored buildings, with a view straight to one of the mildly active volcanoes surrounding the valley. We waited outside a cute church for the farmer, a translator (which we didn't really need, shout out to developing language skills) and the rest of a tour group which were some other university students on a spring break trip. They were doing some sort of volunteering and planning with developing grass roots companies. I bonded with the other fair skinned red head in the group as we both walked in whatever shade we could find.

The views on our way up through the farm were stunning. We kept seeing the mountain sides and the rest of the valley through gaps in the trees. We got a lovely view of the church next to our airbnb, the streets where the major festival had just occurred the day before, and we could see the rowed trees of coffee farms on the distant mountainsides.  Even though I was loving every second of the view I was a little disappointed that we were there during a foggy period. I can't even imagine what these views would have been like on clear day.

The first coffee plant we saw was just a baby, which we were told would be ripe with beans some time in October. The farmers keep the fields rotating so that they have constant production throughout the year.

We saw our first beans, which are actually more like a berry on the plant, a little farther up the path, in the shade of a type of austrian tree with very thin leaves and tiny yellow flowers that are used to decorate the streets with the designs in my last post. Our farmer, Daniel, grows a few different types of coffee. The beans to the left are from a tree that can produce for 100 years. However, they tend to cut and replant at around 75 because the beans start to decline in quality. Other varieties grow for different amounts of time and have different bean qualities.

We kept moving. We hiked up the side of the volcano towards Daniel's fields, which he'd inherited from his father, just as his seven sons would inherit it from him (he also has two daughters, and he's given plots away to his two sons that are already married).

When we made it to the field we'd be working in, a shady grove of coffee plants and austrian trees covered in volcanic ash and bugs (it was beautiful), Daniel taught us the tricks of harvesting: only harvest from the middle of the branch because the berries are biggest there, pinch and pull to seperate the berry from the branch, etc. He also showed us the easiest way to strip the red skin from the berry and how the gel-like coating on the beans inside tasted sweet. Then he set us to work.


To the right you can see the fruits of my labor, ft. the basket tied around my waist (really tightly) with rope and my ash covered hands. Coffee berries are really sticky, so the ash clung to me like it was glue. I also had it smeared all over my face because I kept brushing my hair out of the way. My feet were filthy too because I was silly and wore sandals for a hike up a dusty ash-covered mountain. My feet also got mildly sunburned and had a terrible tevas-like tan line for days (its still kind of there, but you didn't hear that from me). 
I successfully picked 2lbs of coffee berries, all on my own on the side of an active volcano in Antigua, Guatemala. With six of us working, we managed to pick about 14lbs of raw coffee berries, which probably wasn't actually that helpful since most of the beans we picked were unusable. See the more orange-ish one in my hand? Yeah, unusable. 1 bad bean can ruin the flavor of 20 good beans.
I have a new found respect for the coffee I drink. We were picking for about 30 minutes and most of our work couldn't even be used. And this is only the beginning of the process.

We returned to Daniel's house where he and his family handle the rest of the production in the courtyard of their home. The outer skin of the beans is stripped from them on this bicycle-like contraption. The skins are then used as fertilizer for the plants in the fields. We managed to work through our 14-ish pounds in a couple of minutes, taking turns on the bicycle. 

Then he showed us through the process of how they float the beans in water to remove the empty ones, dry them out, then strip off the additional inner skin surrounding the beans.
Everything that is taken out before the beans are roasted is used to fertilize the living coffee plants in the fields. The farmers are really good about what they do and have it down to a science, nothing is wasted. Any coffee that doesn't turn out quite right is what they drink with their meals (I feel kind of bad, because this means they're probably drinking our poorly harvested coffee...). 

We then roasted the beans in a metal pan over a wood burning fire in the family's kitchen. We requested a medium-dark roast and each took a turn stirring the beans around the pan to keep them from burning.
Disclaimer: these are not the same beans we picked. The drying process takes over a week, so this is a different small bowl-full of beans that had been picked much earlier.

After we all took a turn at the burner, Daniel's wife finished off the roasting process, let the beans cool, then started grinding the beans on a stone tablet with a wooden rod. Roasting took about 10 min and grinding about 8. Daniel's wife is a real pro. The whole grinding process probably would have been a lot faster if the group of gringas (us) had actually known what they were doing. The grinding process smelled the best. The whole room filled with the smell of warm coffee. It was like heaven.

The grounds then went into the olla, or pot (the dark blue one in the photo to the right). We then sat around talking, asking questions of Daniel and his family, and just bonding in a room filled with one of the greatest smells on earth.

The coffee, after the whole process, was absolutely amazing. It was full bodied, strong, and not too bitter. I ended up using a lot of sugar anyway because I love my coffee sweet, but I ended up buying an extra bag (we got one for free with the tour). Also, can we just take a moment to admire that adorable little mug? It's so cute, I wanted to keep it. Unfortunately, no such luck. But I brought the amazing coffee home and that's what matters.

The morning finished off with an amazing home cooked meal in Daniel's home. It was delicious chicken, fresh vegetables bought that morning in the local market, rice, and strawberry juice. Never in my life had I considered strawberry juice a thing, but let me tell you I had as many glasses of that stuff as I possibly could. It was fresh pressed minutes before and was absolutely stupendous. 


After a delicious lunch, we left Daniel and his family with a thousand thanks and walked back to the center, where we were picked up by our host's husband, Rafael, and driven back to the house to wash our feet, change clothes and prepare ourselves for the next adventure, a personalized tour to the pueblitos surrounding Antigua led by Rafael, who runs a tour business in Antigua. But I'll talk about that adventure later.