COFFEE, More About

                                               A Fun Costa Rica Visit
    At Café Britt we watched an entertaining live presentation about coffee in the theater.  Britt is a large coffee company that makes many coffee related items. Their coffee liqueur is an excellent one. Their coffee and other items can be purchased from their website. 
    Coffee was discovered in 1500 in Ethiopia and came to Costa Rica in 1750. In the 19^th century coffee plants were given to anyone who wanted to grow them. It takes three years for the plant to produce beans and the plants produce one crop a year. The same field is picked 4-5 times each season, at three weeks intervals. Only the red bean is picked. They are ripe during the dry season, December to March.  
     All coffee beans are picked by hand. Pickers strap a large basket around their waist that when full it weighs 25 pounds. The beans are processed the day of picking. They sit in water 24 hours. Eventually the beans are sun dried for seven days, then can be held up to a year before roasting.

    Coffee grows at elevations between 800-5600 feet.  Some areas are shaded by larger trees, others are not.

     Tomas Acosta first introduced coffee in 1805. In 1821 coffee plants and land were given to people in the Central Valley, but the land belonged to the government. In 1831, the government deeded the land to anyone who had been farming it for the past ten years. At that time the only country trading for coffee was Nicaragua.  

In 1832 Jorge Steeple transported 25 ton of coffee to Panama via mule, where it then went to Chili and then on to England.

In 1844-45 William Lalacheus linked the Central Valley to the Caribbean. The trip from Caldera, Costa Rica around Cape Horn, to England and back to Costa Rica took 18 months.

     In 1900-14 coffee prices dropped and did not go back up until 1939. 
     The Rohmoser brothers owned large coffee plantations and paid their workers with tokens. At the end of the day the workers could turn the tokens in for colones (Costa Rican currency), but the tokens were also used as cash. 
     At one time Costa Rican economy was often referred to as a dessert economy or a coffee/banana economy. 
     I have visited coffee plantations/ facilities in several places but Britt is one of my favorites. Coffee is a labor intensive crop as the coffee beans are picked by hand and most often by women and children. Today many countries export coffee.