Last
April, when Rebecca was here in Peru with me, we visited the ChocoMuseo, a
chocolate museum where the held a “bean to bar” chocolate making workshop which
she and I attended. We really had a lot of fun and learned a lot—roasting the
fermented and dried beans, making two kinds of hot chocolate, grinding the
beans, making chocolate candy. Delicious.
At the time, we learned about the excursions that the
ChocoMuseo offered to visit organic coffee and cacao plantations, but we just
were not prepared to spend the money. This year, however, I decided the
excursion was something I did not want to miss out on. So on Saturday, the
company had enough people to make a trip across the high (14,500 foot) pass and
down into the high cloud forest where coffee grows so well. After a three-hour trip
over the MOST winding and twisting roads I have ever been on, we arrived at the
farm of Julia and Jose and their sons, Miguel and Moises. As we tumbled out of
the car, all looking a little green from the trip, we were welcomed warmly and
shown to our private rooms and allowed to rest a bit and get the dizziness out
of our heads. Then Julia had prepared a hearty lunch, complete with
passion fruit juice, for us before we started on our tour of the farm.
One
of the first things I noticed was the “Programa Organico” sign near the
kitchen. Both the farms we were visiting are certified organic by the
government. Two to three times a year, the farm is inspected to be sure it is
following all organic standards. If they fail the program, they are removed
from it for 10 years!
Jose,
and our English-speaking guide, Abel, pointed out some of the unusual plants
and fruits on the farm. Everything is interplanted here. You don’t just see
rows of coffee or cacao plants. It is a food forest where bananas, passion
fruit, mandarins, achiote, limes, avocados and more, grow alongside the coffee
plants. One colorful plant was the “Nariz del loro,” which is related to banana
and the flower even looks like banana flowers, but it is only ornamental. The
individual blossoms look like a parrot’s nose (nariz del loro). We also saw
potato vine, which is a true potato, except that the potatoes grow above ground
on the vine itself. Abel told us that they make good “papas fritas” (fried
potatoes). The leaves from the guanava are made into a tea which is a cancer
preventative and in Brazil, anti-cancer medicines are made from this tree.  |
| Coca Plant |
On
to the coffee…The coffee here is shade-grown—a growing method which encourages
the farmers to nurture the forest as a whole. Julia and Jose’s farm produces
both red and yellow coffee. Harvest begins in March and runs through August;
with most beans harvested in May and June. The chemicals used on
conventionally-grown (non-organic) coffee affect the acidity and aroma. Some
organic growing methods include:  |
| Interplanted Coffee and Banana Plants |
- Planting coffee seeds in river sand through which boiling water has been passed to kill insects.
- Banana trunks are cut after each fruit stalk is harvested. The water in the trunks, which is high in potassium and other minerals, then flows down to provide enriched water for the coffee plants.
- Plants start producing after the second year and will have 5 to 15 years of good production. Then they are cut back, but in the meantime baby plants have been planted among the mature bushes to ensure a constant harvest. (Farmers save their own seeds for new plants—No GMO’s here!)
We
harvested some beans to take back and learn how the beans are processed.
Most of the coffee beans from this farm go to a local
cooperative where they are processed to the “green bean” stage (see below).
Julia and Jose’s family keeps only some of them for their own use and processes
those by hand. First the beans are run
through a mill which removes the red fruit pulp.
The
beans are allowed to ferment for 12 hours in the large tank, and then they are
washed to remove the slimy fermented flesh. After drying in the sun for 3-5
days until 12% humidity is reached, the hulls of the seed are peeled by machine
and the “green” beans are ready for export. We peeled our own in a small molino (mill), and Jose winnowed them by
hand.
They
were roasted for about 20 minutes. There are three ways to know the roasting is
completed: by color, odor, and sound (crackling). Then same molino was adjusted to a different size
and used to grind the beans for Jose to make us some delicious coffee.
40% of Peru’s organic coffee goes to the US and most of the
rest is exported to Europe.
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| Coffee Seedling |
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| Jose’s Bees – The honey we had for our meals tasted like bananas! |
In my next blog post, I will share what our second day on this excursion was like.