How to Pick Coffee

You will need:

• a coffee grove
• a laundry basket with a sack attached as a belt
• hands

1. Attach the laundry basket around your waist, tightening the grain sack around your hips to hold it snug.

2. Approach coffee tree.

3. Pick any berry that has blushed red. If in doubt, give the berry a hard squeeze.  Could the seed pop out? Good, pick that one too.

4. Do not slip on the banana leaves that cover the ground of the cafetál!  This is all shade grown cofee, so there will be plants of all kinds scattered among the coffee trees.  Take a moment to look upward.  What a peaceful day.

5. Picnic lunch with Memo - beef from our farm, a fried platano, rice, beans, and cabbage salad.  YUM.

6. If you come across a coffee flower, for goodness sake, smell it!  It will smell wonderful.

 

7. Bag up the coffee and take it to the co-op´s sorting machine.  Mixed with all the surrounding farm´s coffee and processed to remove the meat of the berry, this coffee will soon head off (still green) to all corners of the world.