This weekend we organized a trip to Hacienda Alsacia to check out the Starbucks coffee tour. It was exciting to see everyone from the summer program finally together since I wasn’t staying with the group at the hostel.
As a Costa Rican (Tico) it was exciting for me to see how my colleagues from abroad reacted to something as important for Costa Rica as coffee production and processing.
On the tour, the guide taught us how it’s typical for coffee beans to span for up to 4 years from the planting of the first coffee tree seeds until the beans were ready for toasting and shipping to consumers and businesses. She told the group how it used to be typical for tico families to send their children to pick coffee when they had breaks from school to help earn money for the household; which was kind of funny to me since my mom used to be one of these child coffee pickers when she wasn’t in school.
The tour guide touched lightly on the roasting process of beans and how this process is the one to contribute a lot of the flavor and color of coffee beans before showing us to a cozy alcove overlooking a waterfall to try out some of the coffee that they produced locally at the hacienda.
Overall everyone seemed to enjoy themselves throughout the tour and were interested on how this historic part of Costa Rican identity was produced.
We had plans to check out the Poás volcano national park but due to heavy rainfall they closed the park and we had to cancel our plans. But even through the sudden cancellation of the rest of our evening we still had a great time and a great start to our summer program together.