Field trip to Coffee Farm

A coffee plant.  The red ones are ripe.

Do you want to know more about coffee? I went to a coffee farm that is about a half hour away from our house and I learned so much about coffee!

• Pickers get paid $2 for every basket they fill.  An average picker picks 10 basketfulls a day
• Coffee pickers are hard-working people
• They can only have a coffee plant for 30 years or the coffee beans are not so good.
• The red cherries are good to pick
• In order to get to the 2 coffee beans, you have to peel off the skin.  The two coffee beans are slippery.
• Over 100 years ago the coffee pickers used a giant mortar and pestle to take off the skin.  Now they use big machines.
• Every 45 minutes the worker has to rake the beans with a large wooden rake to turn the coffee to help it dry
• The best coffee beans dry in the sun. The not so good coffee beans are dried in a humongous dryer 
• The coffee beans are done drying when they have 11% moisture left, no more, no less

The rake they used to dry the beans

There was also a butterfly garden at the farm with at least five different kinds of butterflies.  At the beginning of the tour, our guide gave us an iced coffee sample, I liked it a little, but the rest of my family loved it.  There was also a souvenir shop where we tasted six different kinds of coffee and bought some presents.

I hope you've learned a lot about coffee and can go on a coffee tour someday.

-Seth Wilson