Blog Post 5 – A Taste of Costa Rica

Overview of the Week

This week, there is not much new to report. We went to the Britt Coffee Plantation, and the rest of the week, I continued working on my two projects at work.

Coffee Connoisseurs

On Sunday, we decided to take a trip to the Britt Coffee Plantation. Only a thirty-minute drive away was this coffee plantation that has one of the most well-known brands of coffee in Costa Rica. Upon arrival, we were greeted by our tour guide – a super enthusiastic, knowledgeable guy (who also doubled as an actor!).

Here is a list of new things I learned about coffee and Costa Rica during our time there:

• Coffee can be used as insect repellant – put coffee grinds in your garden outside to keep the bugs away.
• A coffee plant can live up to 100 years, but only produces good coffee for up to 25 years.
• Coffee season starts in April and goes through November (because this is the rainy season which is necessary for the plant to grow).
• The coffee is then gathered between the months of December to March.
• Coffee is gathered in a basket called a cajuela – one cajuela worth of coffee is equivalent to $3 worth of labor.
• Costa Rica produces 70k tons of coffee, equivalent to 1% of the global coffee production (13th place).
• Brazil is the top coffee producing country at about 60% of the global production.
• Even though Costa Rica is 13th in production, it is 2nd in coffee consumption 🙂
• To know if the coffee fruit is good, make sure it sinks/does not float.
• To make the coffee, you remove the husk of the seed, put the seeds in water, dry them in the sun, plant them to make more trees, or roast them to drink.
• Only 20% of the coffee fruit is actually used to make coffee – the other 80% is used to make fertilizer, coffee essence, and parchment paper.
• Do not make coffee with boiling water – just really, really hot water – unless you want burnt coffee.
• To know if your coffee grounds are fresh, put them in water and see if they float.

The coffee itself was interesting to taste considering that although I love coffee, I don’t typically drink black coffee. Lastly, we got to go to the on-site store and bought fresh coffee and chocolates to bring back home.

 

 

 

 

  

 

Working Hard

This week, there was not much new going on at Establishment Labs. I continued to work on my two projects, mostly doing background research and write-ups about what I have found.

One of these involved finding which common meat (beef, chicken, pork, etc.) is most similar to the pectoralis major muscle where breast implants are placed. This actually turned out to be much harder than I anticipated. You would be surprised to find out that most of the results were talking about which meat is most similar in taste to human meat – definitely NOT what I was trying to learn. I started to approach the topic looking at the elastic modulus of the different meats/human tissue, and I think that this will be a much more promising result. For this same project, we met with some members of the research department to get their feedback on one of the testing strategies that we are hoping to carry out in the coming week or two and got very useful feedback from them on how to proceed. It has been very interesting learning about how these products are tested and how so many people work together to make it happen.

The other project I am working on to develop a brand-new device is also moving rather quickly. This week, we presented our research on the patents on similar existing products, and then showed the team our brainstormed ideas. I was quite surprised to hear that they wanted us to start looking into materials and companies to produce our ideas right away! I am really excited about taking part in this whole process and hopefully seeing one of our ideas come to life.

Going Forward

This week, I will be continuing work on these projects, and will share more of what I learn next week. I think we are now pretty adjusted to life in Costa Rica and have a very regular schedule. Talk to y’all next week 🙂