We aren't coffee drinkers, but Colombia is known around the world for it's coffee so we went to a plantation to see how it's made. Salento, the town we visited, was in the middle of the Zona Cafetera (coffee zone) so we had a few different places to choose from. We took a bumpy 20 minute jeep ride to El Ocaso. It's kind of surprising they're able to transport materials around the country, as the roads are narrow, unpaved, and windy. [Being a supply chain major, it was kind of fun to see production at the starting point, knowing that most Americans only see what they get at Starbucks. It tied in with some of the research I did on fair wages, working conditions, and quality control.]
We learned a lot.... and I forgot a lot already in the last few weeks. But from what I remember, here are the steps of coffee production.
Step 1. plant seed in small black bags. Coffee beans are planted in these small black bags. (On the right, you can see a worker out taking care of a section of the plants). Then they're transfered to riverbed sand. I don't remember how long they're in this stage... maybe a few weeks?
Step 2. transfer plantlings to the ground. The plants won't produce fruit for another 3-4 years. They have plants all around the plantation that are in various stages of life. I don't remember the details, but they produce for something like 10 years, and then have to be cut back for a couple of seasons, and then they'll produce another 10 (?) years.
Step 3. berries turn from green to red and are ready to pick. Colombia has two harvests per year and everything is picked by hand, ensuring higher quality beans.
We got to be coffee pickers for about 15 minutes, and wore these baskets around our waists like the actual pickers do. They're paid by the amount they pick, and that means Hyrum and I would be poor if this were our profession. I think we ended up with 12 berries between the two of us. Some others in our group did much better. From what the tour guide said, usually just red berries are picked, but occasionally they'll pick some green and just separate them as they go. The green leads to lower-quality coffee. Other countries (like Brazil) pick their berries with a machine, which leads to lower quality beans and debris sometimes mixed in. Colombia's method might not be the fastest (or cheapest) but they've been able to build up a reputation for high quality coffee.
Step 4. bean is separated from the surrounding skin/fruit (like the pit from a cherry). Each red berry contains two beans. This machine is the old-school way or separating them, but they obviously have bigger industrial machines now.
Step 5. sift and dry beans. This is where any debris gets separated out, as well as some imperfect or broken beans. Then they're laid out to dry in big racks. (The process we were shown is the most common, but there are other methods as well, like drying the fruit before the beans are separated. Not knowing much about coffee, I haven't got a clue about the resulting different flavors.) Beans are sorted one more time by hand, to pick out the bad stuff. No coffee beans are actually thrown away, they're just separated into first class and second class coffee. That classification affects their market value. At this stage, they're sold in 40 kg bags.
Step 6: roast beans. The plantation also processes and locally sells some of the coffee under it's own brand. They showed us the basic way of roasting the beans... but to get more even distribution of heat they now do it in large ovens. That way none of the beans end up black. And they can control the level of roasting (light, medium, dark).
Step 7. grind beans. Along with having varying degrees of roasting, there are varying degrees of grinding: course, medium, or fine. I didn't know before that Italians use espresso machines, and therefore mostly just buy finely ground coffee. We ground the beans in that machine below (right) but it's obviously done with machines now. Then the coffee was put in those filters, with hot water poured on top.
Step 8: enjoy your coffee... or don't.
A few other notes about Colombian coffee and our experience:
There are two main types of coffee plants, Arabica and Robusta. Colombia primarily produces Arabica, considered higher quality/sweeter. There was a disease that hit Colombian plantations in the 70's that wiped out most of the crop. It's effects were felt for the whole decade, since the plants take so long to get to maturity. After that, they developed a new hybrid plant that would be resistant to the disease.
Below you can see the two types of coffee side by side, with the taller Robusta plant on the left. They joked that Colombians don't harvest that plant because they're not tall enough to reach the top. (Whereas arabica plants are about waist-high.) They also showed us these ladders that workers use to reach the tops of plants, including robusta.
Coffee isn't the only thing they cultivate on the plantation. We were surprised to find ourselves in the middle of a lush garden. There were banana trees, citrus trees, flowers, berries. The explanation is that it's good for the soil, and the taller plants provide good shade, which prevents the coffee plants from working so hard to stay cool. I assume they sell that stuff locally.
Colombia used to export all of it's first-class coffee, leaving Colombians with second-class coffee. They realized that was ridiculous, so they changed to 70% exported 30 % domestic. Colombia doesn't export any of it's second-class coffee--it's all consumed domestically. So while delicious coffee is available in Colombia, it's not that common.
We were there during lunch time, and I thought it was interesting how all the workers gathered to the kitchen to eat soup and who knows what else. (Lunch is a pretty big meal in Colombia.)
Everything in the production process is used, in one way or another. They've done all possible to eliminate waste. Below is a big pile of the "cherry" skin, after it's separated from the bean. They put it in the compost pile to fertilize the soil. (Also, that's Hyrum eating a little fruit called guayaba that has tiny worms inside. You just eat them, and apparently it's good for you. They were falling off trees where we were walking, so he stuck a few in his pockets. Every time we visit Colombia I'm surprised by how many fruits exist that I've never heard of.)
I probably won't remember any of this in months/years down the road, but we had fun exploring one of Colombia's biggest sources of pride, and seeing the beautiful area where they produce coffee. And while we don't drink coffee, the tour made me really want to visit a cacao plantation. I do love chocolate...
