Picking Coffee in Costa Rica

Coffee, mmmhh! Just like everybody else in the western world I am an addict. Nowadays, a branded coffee cup is not just a beverage its an accessory for the upwardly mobile. Every week on our favourite TV shows you can see branded coffee cups strategically placed to catch the eye of the watcher, and boy is it working.  Over the last decade sales of coffee have exploded, the emergence of Star bucks and numerous other coffee chains has added to this. Have you ever stopped and asked yourself where does this coffee come from? How does it end up in our cups? I certainly didn’t before arriving in Costa Rica, but since I am now living on a Costa Rican family run coffee farm I can’t help but find out. Coffee is not only the livelihood of this family but the whole village. Coffee along with the fortunes of the Costa Rican football team is the main topic of conversation and if something significant happens in the coffee world you have to be hiding under a rock not to hear about it.

The coffee crop is hugely important to hundreds of thousands of rurally based families. It is also Costa Rica’s 3^rd biggest export. As you drive through rural Costa Rica you can see the green head height bushes lined up along the hillside. During picking season (November to February) you will see locals busy at work harvesting the bean. When you are in tourist resorts the people working there will proudly tell you that their coffee is the worlds finest. They have reason to boast. Costa Rican coffee is generally of a very high quality. The reputation it has internationally is well deserved it is also known as producing the most caffeine rich coffee in the world. The Tarrazu bean that is produced in Costa Rica is considered among the finest Arabic coffee bean in the world and is enjoyed by gourmet coffee enthusiast worldwide.

Since the family I am staying with are busy with the harvest at the moment I decided the best way to learn about the business is to get involved. I was told to wrap up well, not so much to protect from the sun but from the bugs that are so prevalent in Costa Rica. So, I marched into the field along with the rest of the family at 645am. Everyone from the 65 year old grandfather to the 3 old grandson were in the field picking. Child labour I hear you scream!!Well not exactly he plays with the family dog while the rest of the family pick. As the whole village are in the fields at the same time there is nowhere else to leave him.

Picking coffee isn’t back breaking work; you basically go from plant to plant looking for the red ripe beans. However, it is very tedious work and 30 mins feels like hours. The harvesting season is often more than three months long, this means that the crop has to be picked everyday for 3 months. This is a tiresome and difficult task. The main reason for the lengthy harvesting season is the beans ripening at different times. The beans time of ripening depends on a number of factors one of the most important been the amount of sun the beans get.

In the larger farms help is often sought when the harvesting is at it’s most intense. This comes often comes from out of work immigrants, in Costa Rica’s case often from Nicaragua. They help with the harvesting but are often paid a very low rate for doing so. In the case of the village I am currently in, it comes from an indigenous tribe that lives about 2 days walk from the village. They migrate to our village permanently for the harvesting season; they even have a house in the village for the harvest.

As for my harvesting experience, it started off okay. I went from bush to bush picked the red beans and put them in the basket strapped in front of me. I chatted with the rest of the family who worked at my side and enjoyed the experience. However, as time went on and conversation ran out the work became more tedious. On a number of occasions I picked beans that were covered in ants, the ants understandably weren’t too keen on me steeling their dinner. Justifiably, they proceeded to bite. Working on the side of a hill can also be challenging, on a number of occasions I nearly slipped. Slipping would be a disaster as you would pretty much lose all your harvest as well as bruise your ego. After about 4 hours work I was told it was time for lunch, but first I had to weigh what I had picked. I had picked one “cajuelo”. A “cajuelo” is the unit of measure of coffee in Costa Rica. This turned out to be worth a little over 1000colones, tough work for $2. Later I was told how a neighbour had been picking that same day when a snake fell from the bush into his basket. Luckily he escaped without been bitten!

After the days harvesting is done and everyone has handed their harvest in the days beans are brought to the “recibidor” meaning receiver, usually by the owner of the farm. This is a small hut on the side of a road that is used as a coffee collection point for the surrounding farms. One side of the hut is usually elevated above the road; this is for the trucks that come to pick up the coffee. The beans can then be easily poured into the truck when the trap doors are opened. It is owned by the local cooperative, they are the ones who buy the coffee from the farmers. These little huts are manned by a member of the cooperative who is in charge of ensuring that the coffee collected is of high quality and weighing the coffee. Usually he spends a vast majority of his time picking unripened green beans out of the bags and complaining. He also keeps count of how much each farm collects over the course of the harvesting season. Each farmer is given a receipt for their coffee at the end of the day. Every evening group of farmers gather here to deposit their days harvest and to compare notes on the quality of the crop, amount collect etc, etc.

The cooperative who buys the coffee is then in charge of processing the beans. This takes place in what I known as a “beneficio”. Some farmers keep a small quantity of the crop for their own use; unfortunately this is becoming less and less common. Nowadays the majority of the beans are brought to the “beneficio” where they go through a number of steps before they are packaged and resold. Firstly the coffee beans are split between those grown in the uplands and those grown in the lowlands. Supposedly there is a huge difference in taste between the two. Then the beans are cleaned and the skins are removed mechanically. Traditionally the moist beans were laid out to dry in the sun. Nowadays sun drying is been replaced by mechanical drying. They are then put into ovens where they are roasted. A taster then checks the coffee and decides the quality of the batches. The cooperatives then sell the processed coffee overseas and locally.This article has a more detailed description of coffee processing. The coffee that the Costa Ricans themselves consume is often from their own cooperative which sells the coffee back to them with their brand name. The cooperatives sell different qualities of coffee at varying prices.

The cooperatives are generally seen as providing a good service to the coffee growers. In the region where I am based (Perez zeledon) they not only work with coffee but also have a supermarket, banks and a gourmet coffee chain. Many of the farm owners are affiliates of the various services the cooperatives provide meaning that get special treatment when it comes to banking or other services. For more information about coopeagri follow this link.

The life of the Costa Rican coffee farmers is forever dependent on the ever fluctuating price of coffee. Like everybody they have good years and bad years. This year they are thankfully having a good year. The Brazilian coffee was affected by a hail storm earlier in the year and a lot of their crop was lost leading to a higher demand for Costa Rican coffee. I guess with one persons misfortune comes another’s fortune!