1. Coffee season: the flavorful details
2. Vacation highlights: Bad roads, Mayan ruins and Caribbean islands
3. Holidays: feliz Navidad y próspero año nuevo
1. Coffee season is in full swing. My entire town is involved somehow. If you’ve ever been curious about the process, here’s all you need to know:
Coffee is ripening on the plants and it needs to be picked, or “cut,” as they put it in Spanish. Who is out on the farms picking?: everybody and their mother— literally and sadly, next to childbirth, coffee picking is about the only thing that gets women out of the hous
e in my rural, conservative town. Kids are out of school from November to February mainly so they can help their parents in the harvest. The town is basically dead quiet during the day because everyone is somewhere up in the hills picking.It is a basic concept: pick as many red berries as possible, which are also known as “cherries,” as I’ve heard some people refer to them. But it’s tedious work. The typical worker gets paid around 25-35 lempiras, about $1.25-1.75, per bucket which may represent as many as 30 or 40 plants worth of berries. Adults usually pick around 5-8 buckets in a full day’s work (thus earning around $6-7).
The farm owners, who hire the pickers, “de-pulp” the berries using a type of motorized press, squeezing off the fruity red outer-layer. The beans , inside the red berry part, have a yellow/tan “husk” covered in a sticky liquid called “miel’ (honey). Most farmers, after they de-pulp, wash the beans to clean off the miel. Then they have to decide who to sell their beans to. In my town, the options are one rich family that owns their own company, one “middle-man” who has the reputation for ripping people off price-wise, and then there is the cooperative I work with.
My coop weighs the coffee that comes in and pays the farmer according to the price that day on the commodities market in New York. But, since the official commodity is dried coffee, and the farmers are selling wet coffee, the coop has to take off a discount for the humidity level of the beans. Usually we subtract 45-55% for humidity, depending on how much the farmers have dried their coffee before they bring it in. [The humidity-measuring device is actually pretty cool]
Once we’ve bought the coffee from the farmers, it’s got to pass through two stages of drying so that it reaches 10-12% h
umidity. More, and the beans would be at risk of going sour and/or rotting and less, and the beans would shrivel up and lose their flavor. Step one is solar: we spread out the beans on our outdoor patio and hope for a lot of sunlight. When it’s really sunny, it usually takes half a day to solar-dry the beans. Step two involves large spinning dryers that were donated to the coop by the USDA and imported from Brazil. Each one holds something like 30-40 bags (150lbs each) and takes approximately 30 hours. We have two dryers.Grain elevators then shoot the dried coffee into the next room of
our plant where the coffee is de-husked, i.e. where the bean loses that second, yellow protective layer. The de-husked coffee bean has a sort of dark green tint and looks more like a lentil than the typical roasted coffee one commonly thinks of.Finally, the de-husked coffee is sorted by weight, then runs down a conveyor belt in front of which two lines of workers (predominantly women) sit and pick out the bad pieces for hours and hours. The sorted and selected de-husked coffee is bagged and sealed and stored and then awaits a truck to take it to the port for its long journey to Canada, where all of our coffee is exported.
The company that buys our coffee is Van Houtte, one of the bigger coffee name brands in Canada, and they roast, grind, and market it there and in the New England states—if you’re up for aimless browsing of the web, check out their special Single-Origin line and look for the San Luis Planes, Honduras brand. That’s us. Last year we exported 5500 “quintales,” which are 100 pound bags. That’s a lot of pounds of coffee to be moved, especially when you realize that the five factory workers move it all manually throughout every stage of the process. This year we expect to sell 1000 “quintales” more than last.
2. Vacation highlights: My mother and aunt and a friend of theirs came down to visit me for a week at the beginning of the month. And I’m pretty sure that our trip turned out to be most memorable for them.
Travelling in a 3rd world country isn’t necessarily an easy or smooth feat, to say the least. We had decided that renting a car would be the most comfortable… our goal was to avoid using the infamous bus system of Honduras, which is made up generally of 20-30 year old hand-me-down school buses from the US, which are mostly overcrowded with people and bags and sometimes animals, that run normally on inconvenient schedules. Sure there are a handful of “luxury” bus lines, but we opted for a little more freedom and comfort.
So, thank you Budget Rentals. We rented a shiny Toyota with “4 wheel drive” and headed for my site, where, sadly, it had been raining solidly for the past week. My town isn’t what you’d call “easy to get to” and the roads aren’t “in good condition” and the rain doesn’t “help things” and the tires on this shiny new rental car weren’t “appropriate.” Needless to say, we spun out on hill after hill until we just couldn’t go up any more. It was quite a dramatic attempt and, after everybody’s blood pressure began to increase relative to the incline of the road (ie steeply), we decided to scratch my town from the itinerary and turned around and left for Copan, the Mayan ruins.
The Mayan ruins were very interesting and possibly my favorite pa
rt of the trip. We hired a guide who was of Mayan descent and learned a lot about their history and culture. Copan was a city of about 20,000 that was in its peak as a cultural center from about 400-800AD. We got to see several stepped-pyramid temples and altars. There were also countless statues of kings and gods, a huge staircase of hieroglyphics, and a ball court. I asked our Mayan guide what he thought would happen in 2012 and he told us the whole end-of-the-world thing was all just a big misunderstanding. I’m relieved.We spent the remainder of our trip on Roatan, one of the Bay Islands of Honduras. The boat ride out was quite choppy and one of the four of us,
to remain unnamed, announced “uh oh” just before she got most vocally seasick into a handy pukebag. Our days on the island were spent swimming, eating and drinking beach drinks. It was rough. One morning, Aunt Julie and I went fishing just beyond the coral reef. Again, we’ll leave it nameless, but one of the two of us caught two and the other caught less than that.Lesson learned: all in all is that interesting and memorable vacations can be had in Honduras, so anybody reading this, feel free to come down and visit, assuming I know you.
3. Happy holidays:
I’ll be spending Christmas and New Year’s in my site, with my host family and probably with various other families too. It’s nice to be back after having been travelling and I look forward to seeing how the holidays will be celebrated here. My guess is that celebrations will most likely involve bomb-sized, earth-shaking, glass-shattering firecrackers (see my October post for more ranting on firecrackers).
I send my best to friends and family back home.
