Santa Elena: El Trapiche Tour… Cafe, Cacao y Caña

In the second half of our week in Santa Elena we had 2 more days out: a farm tour and hanging bridges in the cloud forest.

First up a trip to El Trapiche Tour. There are quite a few farm tours in and around Santa Elena and Monteverde and making it difficult to choose which to go on. We chose this one because it was one of the oldest and best established and looked like the children would enjoy it. Interestingly, at the end of the tour we found out that the different tour operators in the area are trying to work together; all of them work under an agreement where they reinvest a percentage of the tour cost into local projects.

The tour was divided into 3 parts looking at sugar cane, coffee and chocolate. We began with sugar cane where our guide explained the differences between modern and traditional cultivation. Canes ripen at different times and can be cut and regrow from the same rootstock; the field that he showed us was over 30 years old. Traditionally, with the work being done by hand, it was possible to keep a field going for a long time but was more labour intensive to go through and select the ripe canes. In modern sugar production the whole field is harvested all in one go. There are multiple negative results from this method. Firstly that you end up with a mix of canes at different stages – some inevitably under-ripe. Secondly and perhaps most importantly is that under this intensive production the field is then dug out and replanted. So a crop which could be treated as a perennial is being cultivated as an annual with dire consequences for soil health. This is a tale which is on repeat in so many areas of food production – hand harvesting becomes too expensive and so scalable ‘solutions’ need to be found but those generally succeed in only one area; making the crop viable in a short-term cost-benefit analysis. The long term the cost of soil degradation is not factored in and will take generations to repair and probably at a much greater cost.

From sugar we moved onto coffee. We had previously seen and learnt about coffee production when we visited Roberto and his family on their farm plus Rachael has visited coffee farms on other visits to Colombia. Nevertheless, there’s always something to learn! One big difference here was that like the tours themselves, the coffee producers in this area had all agreed to pay a higher price per kg for the coffee harvested here. Coffee harvesting is hard work – it takes a long time to fill the big baskets which each hold around 13kg fresh beans which will make around 2kg of roasted beans once shelled and dried. Traditionally this work was carried out in the equivalent of the school holidays with children and students taking part. Hearing about this reminded me very much of the hop-picking season back in England: an annual event that blurred the boundaries between seasonal harvest and holiday. Families from London would make their way down to Kent every Summer spending their days harvesting hops and enjoying time in the countryside away from ‘the big smoke’. Sadly, like our own harvest traditions this seems to be on the decline here in Costa Rica.

Our guide told us about the three primary types of coffee in production – both arabica and robusta I had heard about and researched previously but he then told us about liberica which I had never come across plus one recently discovered variety which apparently tastes exactly like tea! We learned about the different techniques that produce natural process, honey process and so on – the main difference at this first stage is whether the fruit of the coffee bean gets removed or not. Most interesting was learning that as Costa Rica is a relatively small country it became clear that they are unable to compete with Colombia or Brazil in terms of volume. Therefore, they switched their focus onto producing high quality coffee which mainly goes to the export market. This means that they concentrate their efforts on these different processes and even process some of the beans by carbonic maceration; a process of fermentation which I’d heard of before in wine production but never in coffee!

Our guide explained that within Costa Rica the general preference is still a dark roast with mainly ‘burnt’ flavours. The reason behind this is that historically they did not have techniques or machinery for separating the different size beans which meant that both large and small beans would go into the same roaster. Consequently, by the time the larger beans were ready the smaller ones would be burnt and those flavours would dominate the overall blend. From one generation to the next that was how coffee tasted and so a general preference for a dark roast established. This was definitely something that I noticed when we first came to Costa Rica; in contrast to the UK where over the past decade or so we have moved towards lighter roasts.

We were shown the machines which now allow them to sort the beans by size. Larger beans are the highest quality ones – quite simply they are the ones which received the greatest portion of the nutrients whilst growing. This grading allows them to sell each coffee at a premium whilst also helping to achieve a uniform roast for beans which are all the same size and avoiding the cause of those historic burnt tones.

It’s probably fair to say that, by this point, whilst the adults were all fully engrossed in the finer details of coffee production, our children were getting rather bored. Fortunately, after tasting some of the freshly roasted beans we were onto the good bit – cacao!

Cacao production is not a big part of the operation at El Trapiche because it requires more heat and sunlight than they receive in this part of Costa Rica. They had a small area where they were growing cacao under cover but enough for them to grow a reasonable amount. First we opened up the raw cacao pods and tasted the fleshy fruit pulp which surrounds the beans. Nothing about it suggests any link with chocolate – fruity and slightly acidic, it’s interesting in its own right and can be used to make juices, fermentations and nutritionally rich powders. We smelt the fruit pulp in jars which had been fermenting for one week and two weeks: the former smelt like a white wine in the early stages of fermentation whereas the latter had a strong smell of acetic acid (vinegar) about it! Next we tasted the dried cacao beans which taste like a very dark chocolate. By now the girls were a bit more interested but nevertheless a little bit hungry. Dried cacao beans are basically like nibs before they get broken up so tasty and interesting to try but not exactly filling.

Fortunately, at this point in the tour we moved on to see the final stage of the production. There was a small batch of 70% chocolate churning around in a little mill and we all got to scoop out a spoonful and try it – yum! This was a perfectly timed turning point in the tour especially for us with two young children who might otherwise have been nearing the point of rebellion.

Next we went to see the processing of sugar cane but only after first trying a small piece of the raw cane. It’s very fibrous so you need to chew it to extract the juice and then spit out the fibres. This was a little sugar hit, also very well timed, before we saw the big machine in action. Formerly the trapiche was turned by oxen but now it is powered by a large water wheel. Sugar cane is fed in, crushed and raw cane juice comes out.

In the next part of the process we saw the juice being heated up to reduce the water content and produce a more concentrated sugar solution. This juice is then either poured into moulds to make tapa de dulce (which is used to make agua dulce) or poured out and quickly whisked around on a board to make a delicious type of caramel. We really enjoyed doing this with the girls and most of all they enjoyed their sugary treat which came as a result!

The tour ended with a tasting of all the ingredients together. We had a drink of agua dulce along with a cup of honey process coffee a couple of small chocolates and a traditional dish made from arracacha (a member of the carrot family whose root requires a long process of cooking). There was no particularly special taste to this traditional meal but there does seem to be a pattern which has more to do with the time taken to prepare something elevating it to have special status. All in all it was a really good tour. About halfway through as the children were wilting we were thinking that maybe it hadn’t been a good idea but it changed course at just the right time for a happy ending all round. We purchased a bag of honey-process beans and got ready to make our way home.

One other reflection I had after this tour was that there seem to be a large number of tours in Costa Rica which focus on these crops – coffee, sugar cane and cacao. Perhaps this is because they have become so iconic? The thing that interested me was that there is so little opportunity to explore other areas of agriculture through this kind of eco-tourism. We would be just as interested to learn about the cultivation of pineapples, watermelons or any number of the fruits and vegetables which are grown here. Maybe because we have a deep interest in the links between food and land use this interests us more? Even at home we will take time to visit a local farm where perhaps other people wouldn’t. Maybe it’s not a viable eco-tourism opportunity. However, my guess would be that this is on the point of changing as more and more people take an interest in the provenance of what they are eating I can imagine it already having enough of a niche to be at least a small success. Moreover, educating people about how their food is produced is so important in creating a link between consumers and producers enabling a positive feedback loop which improves both diet and land use.

After the tour we called the number that we had previously taken from one of our taxi rides. When the driver arrived I recognised him as the driver who had taken us to the mariposario a few days before. The number I’d taken down was his personal one so for the next few days whenever we needed to go somewhere we would just call and arrange with our new friend Alvaro!

Next day we were off to Selvatura to experience the cloud forest from up in the canopy!