coffee: inside Cafe Britt

The Coffee Tour at Café Britt was a very fun, but also an educational step into the world of gourmet coffee. This is a very important and prestigious crop for Costa Rica.

They took us on a tour through their staged coffee farm visiting their working plantation and roastery. We learned about the sustainable growing practices they use and how important coffee is in both Costa Rica’s social and economic development. We visited the roastery where people were working and packaging coffee. They also taught us a quick, food network type version of professional coffee tasting. I volunteered and was able to get a hands-on lesson of how to be a professional coffee taster. Coffee testing needs to be done by experts. They need to have very strong senses to get the job done. They test and inspect the coffee beans to make sure they are quality. There are lab tests done to make sure it passes certain assessments for example chemical and physical. The quality assessment and analysis is done by the experts that go through a long process to qualify as a coffee testing expert. They test for things like moisture content, black-bean, sour-bean, and broken beans, also other important aspects like the size.

Café Britt is a promoter of organic farming in Costa Rica. They started this program in the early 90’s and it has been successful in enabling organic coffee farmers to make certain that the water, soils, and biodiversity are all preserved. "Café Britt is a service company. We focus on people and we want to positively impact their lives. Which people?Our coworkers, our customers, our suppliers and our community." - Pablo Vargas, CEO

Café Britt works on projects that focus on sustainable Fair Trade practices. They work with small farms on educational projects focusing on sustainable growing. Café Britt also focuses on environmental conservation working on protection and preservation of biodiversity.

Once it was time to harvest the workers at Café Britt would fill their basket with about 25 pounds of coffee. Once they went through processing, the weight reduced significantly. I was able to see that very well when I volunteered to be a tester. The guides said that people might even suck the juices out of the coffee because they are fruits. They said to be careful because this fruit from the bean is in fact a laxative. Café Britt harvests the fruits once they are ripe. They make sure they do this in the same day or else the coffee might develop a bad taste. They take them to the plants and put them in a machine. This machine takes some of the skin off of the bean and then the beans are washed releasing the second layer of skin. Once they get the layers of skin off they need to dry the beans. There are a few ways in which they can do this: one which is free or buy using a drying chamber. Of course the free way of drying coffee is through the use of the sun, which is very time consuming. The other way is expensive and could have possible machine problems. They can also replant the seeds if they don’t think they are quality, they do this my putting them into soil and placing banana leaves on top.