Coffea Arabica

Following the required post for coffee, last week the second coffee plantation we visited was Café Britt. This was a large scale corperation who actually does not grow the majority of their own coffee but buys it from smaller growers in specific regions, all over Costa Rica. This differs from the other plantation that we visited because of its sheer size and the fact that it does not grow the majority of its own coffee.

When we visited, the tour that was given was of an organic field or section, which is the ideal item now on the market. What is meant to be organic, is the lack of pesticides used in the growing. The coffee is allowed to grow into its natural ripening stages and is picked then dried like standard coffee. Like it was mentioned in the Devils Blend post, this type of growing is very expensive and generally cannot be the primary product for a company smaller than a corperation (caffee britts focal is still chemically grown coffee, but they have the resources to support this growing)

The tour itself felt more along the lines of a Disney tour of the Small World ride. Our guides would often make jokes and elementary run downs of the process for which coffee is made, showing that at the end product, that only 20% of the origional fruit remains (the whole time dressing in costumes of certain countries). It was noticable that a prime differnce in the production of each plantations coffee, Britt would often dry thier coffee in machines to save time and money, while Del Cafe Tal primarily used drying tables which used the power of the sun to do the work. More than often, I felt that the primary goal of our tourguides was to draw attention to them and provide vague facts which would deter questions about their big business practices.
Overall the tour was intrigueing because it did take us around the headquarters of the company. It is very clean and the tour entertaining if you have children along or happen to be on certain types of drugs (which I dont condone). It does provide some interesting information and a glimps into an industrialized approach to packaging coffee for shipment around the world. Some of the basic coffee smelling practices are shown to enhance a coffee tasting experience (you need suck a sip of fresh coffee in in quickly with a lot of air) and thankfully they ended the tour with a stop at a gift shop which could be mistaken for a high end gift shop in San Jose (included are many trinkets and shirts not conducive coffee drinking, though I dont drink coffee so Im not sure).