Le temps des cerises

Il y a quelque temps, je vous montrais à quoi ressemble le café avant qu’il lui arrive plein de choses pour qu’on puisse le consommer (piqûre de rappel au cas ou : https://audreyslangscape.wordpress.com/2012/12/26/la-verite-sur-le-cafe-version-novices-1ere-partie/).

Maintenant j’ai envie de parler de la récolte. C’est un des moments forts de l’année au Costa Rica, et celui pour lequel je voulais absolument passer du temps dans un pays producteur. Quand on reçoit le café en Europe ou ailleurs, dans le meilleur des cas on a des informations sur la région d’où provient le café, ou encore mieux sur la ferme, le producteur, la variété de café et la façon dont il a été transformé. Qu’en est-il de la récolte? Sans faire un recensement exhaustif des récolteurs du pays, j’avais envie de mettre des images derrière une tradition en perte de souffle.

Quand j’explique avec mes trois mots d’espagnol que je suis venue au Costa Rica pour apprendre plein de choses sur le café, presque tout le monde me raconte un souvenir d’enfance dans les cafetales (là où pousse le café). Je dis “presque” tout le monde, parce qu’il semblerait tout de même qu’il faille soit avoir la quarantaine bien tassée, soit avoir un membre de sa famille possédant une ferme.

En fait la récolte a toujours été une affaire de famille. Elle a lieu de décembre à février, ce qui correspond à la saison sèche (le reste de l’année étant la saison humide) et aux grandes vacances pour les écoliers, et ce dans le but d’avoir plus de main d’œuvre pour la récolte. Avant, toute la famille partait dans les plantations, parfois même dans plusieurs fermes, afin d’aider à la récolte. Même s’il y a toujours un fort aspect émotionnel lorsqu’on me compte ces souvenirs d’antan, il y a également un aspect “corvée” bien présent. Et oui, tout comme les vendanges, ce n’est pas une partie de plaisir, être en plein soleil toute la journée, piqué par les moustiques. Est-ce la raison pour laquelle plus personne ou presque ne veut participer aux récoltes?

Dans la région de Tarrazu, à juste titre célèbre pour la finesse des saveurs du café qui y pousse, avait lieu il a quelques semaines la Feria del café. Sous ses airs de fête populaire, tout un tas d’évènements ayant pour but la découverte du monde du café (car oui, c’est pas parce qu’on est dans un pays producteur qu’on est incollable sur le sujet, est-ce que tous les Français, Italiens ou autres Chiliens savent comment le vin est produit?), du producteur au consommateur. Mais ce qui a retenu mon attention, ce sont les séries de danses plus ou moins traditionnelles qui se sont déroulées chaque jour.

Prenons par exemple ce premier groupe de danseurs (désolée par avance pour la qualité médiocre de la vidéo) :

Nous avons là quelques enfants, habillés en paysans traditionnels (comme sur la photo ci-dessus). Ils ont tout l’attirail du parfait ramasseur de café, le chapeau, le panier et sa ceinture, les sacs de jute, les pelles pour planter les caféiers, tout sauf…des cerises de café! La chanson (que, par ailleurs, peu de gens connaissent, même si elle passait en boucle pendant la féria), vante le bon temps de la récolte. Même s’ils sont plutôt mignons habillés en costume traditionnel, on voit tout de suite à l’imprécision de leur geste qu’ils n’ont pas dû passer beaucoup de temps dans les cafetales justement.

Deuxième vidéo et ce n’est guère beaucoup mieux, la récolte semble être un moment clairement idéalisé pendant lequel on chatouille les arbres et où les garçons font tourner les filles.

Même chanson que dans la première vidéo, autre groupe de danseurs un peu plus âgés. Voilà ce que raconte le refrain :

“Les producteurs sont contents,

la récolte est très bonne,

comme c’est sympa de ramasser le café,

d’être dans les plantations,

parmi les papillons,

il y a 200 ans, le Costa Rica voyait naitre cette tradition de joie et d’émotion”

Je n’ai jamais entendu cette chanson pendant la récolte en tout cas…

Alors que faire? Le café pousse en abondance, mais il y a depuis longtemps trop peu de candidats pour le ramasser. Comme souvent, la seule solution est d’ouvrir les frontières à ceux qui veulent travailler. C’est alors que depuis les années 80, de nombreux Nicaraguayens et Panaméens sont arrivés au Costa Rica par le nord et par le sud, de façon permanente ou de façon saisonnière pour travailler dans les plantations de café ou de cane à sucre. Et voilà que la récolte du café redevient une affaire de famille, puisque c’est souvent en famille que l’immigration s’effectue. On reconnait les femmes du Panama grâce à leurs robes colorées, comme ces deux petites filles :

Alors pourquoi un tel manque de main d’œuvre? Pendant longtemps, c’est parce qu’il y avait bien trop de café à ramasser par rapport au nombre d’habitants. Mais la population Costaricienne s’est accrue très rapidement et maintenant, les conditions de travail difficiles, l’exode “urbain” et probablement l’aspiration à une vie plus moderne n’attire plus grand monde dans les cafetales.

Et il faut dire que si l’on veut bien faire les choses, ce n’est pas chose aisée de ramasser le café. Le problème c’est que, comme on peut le constater sur la photo, les cerises ne mûrissent généralement pas toutes en même temps, ce qui rend le ramassage mécanique quasiment impossible (encore une fois, si on veut faire les choses bien).

Là où ça se complique, c’est que même lorsque l’on ramasse une cerise bien rouge, il arrive souvent que l’envers soit jaune ou vert, donc pas mûr. Il faut donc redoubler d’attention, ce qui n’est pas évident ni très motivant lorsque l’on est payé au poids et non à l’heure. Par contre, il faut bien préciser qu’une telle attention n’est pas portée par tous les producteurs. Je parle ici de fermes relativement petites et visant une qualité de café supérieure à celle de la grande distribution.

Et une fois ramassé, qu’est-ce qu’on fait du café? Si le producteur possède son propre beneficio, la quantité de cerises ramassées est comptabilisée à différents moments de la journée, par exemple en fin de matinée et en fin d’après-midi. Pour cela, comme on voit sur la photo ci-dessous, on les met dans une grande boîte en fer appelée cajuela qui est de taille standard. Comme on mesure les plantations en manzana, la quantité de cerises ramassées possède sa propre unité de mesure, la cajuela, qui est équivalente à 20 litres.

Sur cette photo on voit Don Carlos Ureña, propriétaire passionné de la finca La Pira, qui est l’un des producteurs les plus imaginatif et inspirant que j’aie rencontré jusqu’à maintenant. Il est très attentif à la façon dont les quelques personnes qui travaillent avec lui traitent le café. Pour chaque personne, il écrit la quantité de cerises ramassées en cajuela :

Pour les fermes qui n’ont pas de beneficio, le café est emmené dans un recibidor (les petites maisons en bois le long des routes) où des camions circulent le soir afin de collecter le café déposé dans la journée. Dans le temps, des sortes de calèches en bois très colorées étaient utilisés, comme celle ci-dessous. Désormais on ne les trouve que dans les musées.

Oui, c’est moi, en route pour participer au concours de ramassage de café de la feria de Frailes. Et non, j’ai pas gagné 🙂

L’altitude, les variétés, la composition de la terre, la grande différence de température entre le jour et la nuit, l’ombre, sont autant de facteurs contribuant à la production d’un café de qualité. On oublie parfois que le ramassage est une étape essentielle car c’est une des premières étapes de sélection, on ramasse les meilleurs cerises bien mûres pour faire le meilleur café possible. Même si ça à l’air d’un détail, j’espère avoir montré que c’est un détail qui a toute son importance. Dans un monde idéal, on pourrait imaginer plus de solutions pour aider les producteurs à être encore plus pointilleux, en créant des liens plus étroit entre toutes les personnes impliquées dans la longue chaine de production du café par exemple, en donnant plus de moyens au producteurs. Si ça vous intéresse, je vous conseille d’aller faire un tour sur le site de Tim Wendelboe, torréfacteur (entre autres) norvégien, qui a mené un projet super intéressant en Colombie.

The art of being picky

Everytime I mention coffee picking in Costa Rica, it brings smiles on people’s faces. Almost everybody has childhood memories of their summer holidays spent in the cafetales (coffee plantations). I say “almost” because it seems you need to either have a relative who is a coffee farmer or be more than forty years old.

Conveniently enough, the harvest happens in the summer, summer meaning dry season, since there are actually only two seasons here, one dry (short) and one wet (most of the year). Schools close from mid-December to mid-February, originally so that kids could help out in the fincas (coffee farm).  During the cosecha (harvest), life stops and everybody is out in the cafetal picking coffee, although most of those who actually picked coffee as a child also tells me how much they hated it. They remember being in the sun all day, bitten by mosquitoes. So why are people being so emotional about it? Because it doesn’t exist anymore. I mean, I am pretty sure some kids still help out in the family finca, but it is not as common as it used to be, and there has been a shortage of coffee pickers for many years.

A few weekends ago, I attended the Feria del café in the beautiful little town of Frailes in the well-known coffee region of Tarrazu. It was a very interesting event where a lot of important coffee culture-related things happened. For example, groups of dancers from different areas of the country came to dance. There was first this group of children dressed as traditional campesinos, a person who works in the fields, and particularly in the cafetal. The setting is perfect, all the accessories are here: large hat, canasta, belt to hold it, jute bags, showels, baby coffee tree, even a wheel of a traditional carreta which was used to bring the coffee from the plantation to the beneficio (wetmill) before trucks were used. Everything but…actual real coffee cherries! The song tells about the happy time of the harvest, how nice it is to work in the cafetal together with the butterflies. No matter how cute they look, their body language (and the gesture of their hands) reveals their lack of experience as coffee pickers. (and sorry about the terrible quality and my absence of filming skills)

The second video features older kids dancing on another kind of song romanticizing even more the life of a coffee picker whose job it is to tickle the tree and dance and carry girls around.

The last video shows another group of dancers dancing on the same song than the first video, here is what the chorus says:

“The farmers are happy,

the harvest is very good,

how nice it is to pick coffee,

to be in the coffee plantation,

among the butterflies,

200 years ago Costa Rica was the place of birth of a tradition of hapiness and emotion”

So what to do? Coffee grows everywhere, but there is a lack of people willing to pick it. The obvious solution is to open the borders. Since the 80s, People from Nicaragua and Panama has come to Costa Rica to work as coffee pickers or in cane sugar plantations. And now coffee picking has begun to be a family thing again. Many Nicaraguans I met came along with their families to either spend the summer picking coffee or have been living in the country for years. The distances are not very long between Nicaragua and Panama, but Panamanian people are mostly to be found in the southern part of the country when Nicaraguans are in the center and northern part. The Panamanians also come to work with their families. They are easily recognizable by the colorful dresses of the women like those two girls at the feria:

So, what is so difficult with picking coffee? Why are (or should be) growers so picky about it? Well, first of all, just like you need ripe sweet fruits to make a good jam, you need ripe red cherries to make the best coffee, those with the highest sugar content. The thing is, on one coffee tree, on one branch, not all the cherries will ripen at the same time, which basically make mechanical harvest impossible for high quality coffee. Therefore it needs to be hand-picked.

Here you can clearly see the differences: unripe cherries together with perfectly ripe ones.

A coffee picker needs to be really careful not to pick apparently ripe cherries, but they are tricky little things. You see it red on one side, you pick it, turn it around, and it’s all yellow on the other side, which is not ok. Also, you are not supposed to pick the stalk of the cherry. A coffee picker should be careful yet he has to go fast since most of the times, they are paid by the weight of cherries picked, not by the hour.

Things you need when you pick coffee: A large hat that covers your neck, good boots not to slip (for example rubber boots that grips the ground properly, remember that coffee usually grows in the mountains so most of the time the plantation are from a little to quite steep) and a canasta, sort of basket that you tight around your hips with a sort of belt.

That said, coffee isn’t picked as meticulously is any farm. I am talking about rather small farms with a focus on high quality coffee that will be exported. This step of the coffee making is one of the first that makes a difference in the quality of the cup of coffee you will drink.

What happens when the coffee is picked? There are two options. Some farms have their own wet mill, which is a place where the cherries are processed (If you have no idea what I’m talking about I promise you will very soon). At different moments during the day (usually late in the morning and at the end of the afternoon), the cherries collected are weighed. As you can see on the photo below, the cherries are put in a big box called cajuela. Coffee has its own measuring unit (1 cajuela = 20 liters). Here you can see one of the most inspiring and creative farmer I’ve met, Don Carlos Ureña, owner of finca La Pira, inspecting the harvest.

For each person, he would write down the amount of coffee picked:

However, most of the farms don’t have a mill. They need to bring the cherries to a nearby mill. Back in the days, beautiful wooden carts like this one below were used, but nowaydays, you’ll meet plenty of trucks during the coffee picking season.

ok, don’t laugh, this is the only picture I had to show you a traditional colourful Costa Rican cart. This pic was taken at the feria del cafe right before the coffee picking competition…and yes, I competed!

Altitude, varietals, composition of the soil, cold nights and warm days, shade, are all more or less well-known secrets to produce high quality coffee. But picking the right coffee cherries is a step prior to processing that matters, a lot. It sounds easy, but it is actually a real challenge. In an ideal yet possible world, there are a few solutions that would help farmers and pickers to be more picky (sorry about the bad pun) like making people from the seed to the cup work together (in the farms, mills, roasteries and cafés). If you are interested in that matter (and you should), I suggest you watch this :

http://timwendelboe.no/2012/08/nordic-barista-cup-lectures-2/

Vie quotidienne au pays du café en 5 faits

Fait n°1 : Le café pousse partout, le long des routes, dans les montagnes, dans les jardins, sur les ronds points…et c’est magnifique!

Quelque part entre Santa Maria de Dota et Frailes, dans la région de Tarrazu, Costa Rica.

Même endroit, la café pousse tranquillement à l’ombre des bananiers et autres arbres fruitiers.

Montagnes recouvertes de plantations de café dans un des plus beaux villages du pays, Santa Maria de Dota, 1650 à 1800m d’altitude, Tarrazu, Costa Rica.

Fait n°2: Entre décembre et mars, la saison de la récolte, tôt le matin ou en fin d’après midi, circulent des pickups remplis de gens à l’arrière portant d’étranges chapeaux leur couvrant la nuque et des bottes en caoutchouc. Ce sont les récolteurs de café! Pas de photo, je n’ai pas encore osé les photographier…

Fait n°3: Au bord des routes, presque à chaque kilomètre, il y a comme des petites (ou grandes) cabanes, la plupart du temps en bois, ce sont des “recibidor”, c’est-à-dire des abris pour rassembler la récolte des plantations alentour au fur et à mesure dans la journée.

On voit ici un camion venant délivrer le café ramassé de la matinée ou de l’après-midi. Chaque “recibidor” appartient à un endroit spécifique où le café sera emmené plus tard dans la journée pour être traiter. Ici dans la région de Tarrazu, Costa Rica.

Camion rempli de cerises de café attendant de décharger dans le “récibidor”.

Fait n°4: A la fin de la journée, la circulation peut-être bloquée par les camions qui viennent collecter le café ramassé dans la journée à chaque “recibidor”.

Un “recibidor” se compose de deux ouvertures : une en hauteur pour délivrer le café récolté, une autre en bas pour que la camion qui passe collecter les cerises de café passe en dessous. Il y a comme un tunnel que l’on ouvre pour vider le contenu du “recibidor” dans le camion. Ici à San Gerardo de Rivas, Perez Zeledon, Costa Rica.

Parfois il y a plusieurs ouvertures dans les grands “recibidor” appartenant aux grandes coopératives comme ici à Tarrazu.

Un autre grand “recibidor” appartenant à Coopetarrazu.

Fait n°5: Remarquez les arrêts de bus! Les grandes coopératives ou autres entreprises liées au café sont une source de revenus importante dans les petits villages environnants, parfois la seule. Il est courant qu’ils aident au financement de biens pour la communauté.

Arrêt de bus à San Pablo de Leon Cortez, Tarrazu, Costa Rica.

Un autre dans le village

Un autre exemple, une autre coopérative à Rivas, Perez Zeledon, Costa Rica.

5 daily-life-facts about a coffee growing region

1/ Wherever you go, it is gorgeous and there is coffee absolutely everywhere.

Somewhere between Santa Maria de Dota and Frailes, Tarrazu, Costa Rica.

Same road, coffee growing in the shades of banana trees and other trees.

Hills covered by coffee trees in the shade of banana trees in one of the most beautiful places in Costa Rica, Santa Maria de Dota, 1650-1800m of altitude, Tarrazu, Costa Rica.

 

2/ Between December and March, early in the morning and late in the afternoon you’ll see pickup trucks driving people around with strange hats covering the neck and rubber boots, they are coffee pickers. For some reasons I didn’t dare taking pictures of them.

3/ Along the road, every kilometre or so, you will see (most of the time) little (often wooden) huts. In Spanish they are called “recibidor” and are used to gather the coffee picked in the area.

A truck is delivering the coffee picked so far in the day in a “recibidor” belonging to the mill where the coffee will be brought later on to be processed, here in Tarrazu, Costa Rica.

Truck waiting to deliver coffee at a recibidor, Tarrazu, Costa Rica.

4/ By the end of the day, you won’t be slowed down by traffic jams but by trucks collecting the harvest of the day to bring the coffee cherries to the nearby mill where they will be processed.

A recibidor has 2 openings : the upper one where the coffee is delivered and the lower one where a truck fits underneath to receive the cherries going through a small opening. Here in San Gerardo de Rivas, Costa Rica.

Sometimes there are several openings like this one in Tarrazu, Costa Rica

Big recibidor from a major cooperative in Tarrazu, Costa Rica.

5/ Check out the bus stops! In small villages where most of the income is made by coffee, cooperatives or mills tend to sponsor public services.

Bus stop in San Pablo de Leon Cortez, Tarrazu, Costa Rica

Another one in the same village.

Other example in Rivas, Perez Zeledon, Costa Rica.

Happy new year’s hike in Cerro Chirripó

If you ever are in Costa Rica, want to escape from mass tourism and be surrounded by nature, you can either help out in coffee farms, or climb the highest mountain of the country. Today I’ll tell you about the latter where I decided to go for New Year’s eve and day 2013.

It is 3820 meters high (12533 feet) and its name is Cerro (mount) Chirripó (meaning “Place of enchanted waters” in the Talamanca Indian language). From the capital city, San José, you need to reach a town called San Isidro del General which is 3 hours away to the south in the Perez Zeledon region. It’s a nice journey and hopefully you will make it through the beautiful Cerro de la muerte (3491m). Once you are in San Isidro, you need to get to San Gerardo de Rivas (a tiny quiet village I fell in love with as soon as I arrived in the country) some 20km away but it will actually take you an hour and a half since most of the road is a path. Once you are there, I would recommend to stay in one of the hotels situated 2km away from the village, so that you feel even more disconnected. Besides they are right next to the entrance of the National Park, which saves you a 2km walk uphill for the big day.

Practical detail (and my only complain about Costa Rica): you need to be a little organized. Since a maximum of 40 persons per day are allowed in the (huge) park, you need to get a permit to enter it and stay at the base camp.  One day in the park will cost you 15$, add to that 10$ for a bed at the Crestones base camp, which you might consider unless walking 40km up and down in a day is an option for you. If you are Costa Rican though, the trip will be a lot cheaper, like any hike in any park in the country. I have been asking many people why such a big difference, and even though everybody will tell you it is unfair, they will also tell you it has always been like that, and it will probably not change by fear of a general rise.

The surrounding nature is stunning. It changes at almost every kilometer. At the beginning of the trail, you walk through tropical rainforest, then cloud forest and then it turns to dry tundra where the sun shines hard since you are not protected by the trees or the clouds anymore.

I won’t describe the hike in details but I can tell you why I enjoyed this hike so much. Even though it is well marked (every kilometer is given a name according to the surrounding landscape), it was quite challenging. On the first day, most people walk 2/3 of the hike to get to the base camp, that is to say 15 km uphill, the first 5 km and the last 2 km being the steepest thus toughest part. You walk from 1500m to more than 3000m, and you definitely feel the altitude oppressing your lungs. The morning after, it’s a 5 km hike to the summit and then many trails around to discover.

Those perrots were loudly flying around in big groups eating up guavas

Red punk birds

km 1, the monkeys! Didn’t see any that day though.

But there were squirrels

Upside down bird

I like those beautiful yellow and black birds

Big black bird

Landscape at around 1700m early in the morning

Unfortunately, no quetzal to be seen that day!

Old man’s beards!

Endlessly huge trees

Bamboos

Another kind of punk bird

Couldn’t agree more!

High trees in the cloud forest

At that point, you should be sorry you made it

Mountain flowers

Lots of lezards

Almost there!

View from the summit

Another panoramic view from the summit

Don’t forget to write in the book before you walk down!

Bon voyage!

The apology of slowlitude

I once read on a t-shirt somewhere « the best ideas come while walking ». I just spent 3 days on my own, walking through Costa Rican mountains, I had time to think. A lot of time.

I have been travelling around for four months now and one of the first thing people ask me, even before asking me where I am from or what my name is, is “are you on your own?” It seems to trigger many people’s curiosity to see a woman travelling alone, whether It is in Europe, in the United States or in Costa Rica. When the answer is “yes, I am”, I observe two kinds of reaction. Some people treat me like some sort of super hero, other like a poor lonely thing. That surprises me since I don’t consider myself as one or the other and it gets me thinking.

There are two things that I highly appreciate when travelling alone. One thing is the solitude. I find this word very interesting in English. The notion of time seems crucial to define it, a short-term solitude being a positive thing, while a long-term solitude leads to loneliness. We don’t have that differentiation in French, and “solitude” is used for both solitude and loneliness, and as far as I know, bears negative connotations. So when I went back to my hotel, I googled it. The first hits are about personal development and learning how to love yourself, then comes dating website and forums. Interesting, isn’t it?

The Wikipedia definition of solitude in English says that as far as health is concerned, complete isolation leads to distortions of time and perception. My case is not that bad, but travelling does affect your notion of time. Everybody has experienced loosing tracks of the days of the week while on holiday. That brings me to the second thing I enjoy while travelling, which is taking my time, not jumping from one city/country to another. Many tourists like me go on a Central America tour in a couple of weeks, sometimes a month or more. I considered doing that myself, but quickly forgot about it. I wanted to take it slowly, I like to slow travel (sometimes to the extreme, like living in Norway for four years, still don’t know how that happened!). This is somehow a luxury, since most people don’t have the freedom to take months off to travel (then again, I can argue with that), but as far as I am concerned, I find it extremely frustrating to not have/take the time to get to know a place and its people. You can’t sum up a country and even less a culture in a week time. To me, travelling isn’t about “doing” a country, but actually trying to learn and understand in order to put things in perspective.

That’s how I came up with the idea of slowlitude. What is nicer than taking the time? Taking the time to walk slowly on your own through unknown places and listen to whatever is going on around you, whether it is people chatting in a café or birds flying around you in a forest?  “Freedom is considered to be one of the benefits of solitude” says Wikipedia again, I would say freedom is one of the benefits of slowlitude! Have you experienced that before?

Do you know what Braulio Carrillo is?

A few kilometers north of San José, the capital city of Costa Rica, there is a big national park called Braulio Carrillo, from the name of a former president, not a very romantic story I concur. Every year  people get lost in those mountains covered by a dense primary forest. There are several volcanoes there that haven’t been awake for thousands of years. The more accessible one is called Barva, and offers nice hikes from a crater lake to another at about 3000 meters above sea level. I first went hiking through an area close to San Isidro de Heredia (1500m high), and went back to hike to the Barva volcano.

What really strikes me anywhere I go in Costa Rica is how fast the climate and thus the landscape vary. I am unfortunately not a forest specialist but from what I understood, when hiking at lower altitude like, you walk through a rainforest, so thick that sometimes you can’t see much through the dense foliage. You see all sorts of plants; kind of like those you buy at ikea to fill in the living room corners but which die after a few months for “some reasons”. Here in their natural habitat they are several meters high. Most animals are nocturnal so you don’t meet them very often but you do hear sounds of life and I always feel that even though I don’t see them, they are watching me penetrating their home.

At higher altitude though, it’s a different story. You go from steep trails through the cloudforest to flatter areas covered by grass, cedar and pine trees. You might as well be hiking in the Alps! Even the houses look different and the cows are fatter and look happier to chew high quality grass (it’s very wet there). Just the journey to the ranger station is worth the trip. If you’re lucky enough, the whole Central Valley is at your feet, you can even have glimpses at the Pacific Ocean. I was there at 6.30am (yes I was!) and the weather was very nice. (By the way, another thing that surprised me here is that all year round, the sun set around 5.30pm and rise around 5.30am, so weird when you’re used to French or, even worse, Norwegian seasons!). But as expected in this area, it didn’t last very long and clouds quickly surrounded the summit of the volcano.  Despite his high level of biodiversity, it is one of the least visited park in the country, which makes it even nicer to visit!

What you see while hiking through the rainforest :

Those leaves are much bigger than it seems

Trail in the rainforest

Leaves developping

View over the mountain range

What you see while hiking through the cloudforest :

Cloudforest!

Crooked trees in the cloudforest

Beautiful tree fern

Leaf developping in the cloudforest

More crooked trees in the cloudforest

And a bit higher, it’s all flat and green, with cedar and pine trees.

Hummingbird

View over the Central Valley

C’est quoi ça Braulio Carrillo?

A quelques kilomètres au nord de San José, capitale du Costa Rica, se trouve l’un des nombreux parcs nationaux du pays. Chaque année, un certain nombre de randonneurs se perdent dans les montagnes du vaste parc Braulio Carrillo (du nom d’un ancien président). C’est donc avec raison que j’ai décidé d’écouter les locaux qui me conseillaient de ne pas m’y aventurer seule (soupir de soulagement de ma mère à la lecture de cette information, me trompe-je ?). Recouverte de forêt tropicale, la chaîne de montagnes abrite également quelques volcans endormis dont Barva,  le plus accessible, qui offre des chemins de randonnée d’un cratère à l’autre à environ 3000 mètres d’altitude. Il y a quelques semaines, j’allais me promener dans une partie du parc près de San Isidro de Heredia, moins haute (1500m) pour découvrir l’autre partie il y a quelques jours, celle du volcan Barva.

Ce qui m’étonne un peu partout au Costa Rica c’est la variété de microclimats et donc la variété de paysages que cela engendre sans forcément avoir à parcourir de longues distances. Malheureusement je ne m’y connais pas super bien en sortes de forêts mais j’ai appris ici qu’il en existe un paquet. D’après ce que j’ai compris, les forêts à basses altitudes sont les forêts tropicales. Elles sont denses et souvent on ne distingue pas grand chose entre les feuillages. On y trouve toutes sortes de plantes du type « plante exotique » qu’on achète chez Ikea pour décorer le salon mais qui meurent au bout de quelques mois pour d’ « obscures raisons », sauf qu’ici elles font plusieurs mètres de haut. La plupart des animaux vivent la nuit, donc on ne croise pas grand monde mais les bruits alentours nous rappellent constamment que non, nous ne sommes pas seuls, bien au contraire. J’ai toujours l’impression d’être observée de tous les côtés quand je me promène dans ce type de forêt et je ne pense pas que ça soit une forme de paranoïa, quoique…

Un peu plus haut, c’est autre chose. On rencontre un autre type de forêt, appelé forêt de nuages (sorte de forêt tropicale à plus haute altitude donc, puisque dans les nuages) et encore un peu plus haut, les surfaces s’aplanissent, on y voit des cèdres ou des sapins, il y a de l’herbe partout, des vaches apparemment bien heureuses de leurs conditions de vie, on se croirait presque dans les Alpes ! Rien que le voyage pour accéder à l’entrée du parc vaut le détour puisque la route qui s’apparente d’ailleurs plus à un chemin, serpente le long de la montagne offrant une vue imprenable, lorsque dégagée, sur la Vallée Centrale (toute une région du pays) et même l’océan pacifique. J’y étais à 6h30 (du matin, oui oui !) et j’ai eu cette chance, bien que cela ne dura point car les nuages recouvrent traditionnellement les sommets dans la matinée. Je m’étonne aussi souvent de la durée des journées qui est quasiment toujours la même tout au long de l’année, c’est-à-dire que le soleil se lève tous les jours vers 5h30 pour se coucher vers 17h30, assez surprenant quand on est habitué aux saisons françaises ou pire, norvégiennes ! Malgré une biodiversité des plus élevées, le parc reste l’un des moins visités du pays, rendant l’expérience d’autant plus appréciable !

Ce qu’on voit dans le parc national Braulio Carrillo à 1500m d’altitude :

Vue sur les montagnes du parc

Exemple de feuille, on ne voit pas bien sur la photo mais elles sont énormes en vrai

Autre exemple de feuilles

Un aperçu de la forêt tropicale

… et à 3000m d’altitude :

Arbre fougère, typique des forêts tropicales

Toujours intéressant d’observer la formation des feuilles

Forêt de nuages

Forêt de nuages

Forêt de nuages, arbres tordus

Sapins et cèdres

Colibri

maison et vue sur la vallée centrale

A truth about coffee (for beginners) – part 1

When people ask me about my job, I often have to explain what it is about (particularly in France where it is still quite unknown, but not only). Almost every time, someone asks me “So what do you advise me to make good coffee at home?” I have many answers in mind to that question, but to begin with, I usually say that coffee actually is a fresh product and not something you can drink within a year after you buy it in the grocery store.

This mean two things. The first one, which I’m going to talk about in this post, is that coffee actually comes from a fruit picked during just a few months in the year (well, it also depends on different variables like countries, varietals, altitude of growth). The second one, which I’ll talk about in another post, is that the roasting part is essential. In Costa Rica, the high time of the year to pick coffee goes from December to February. Without going too much in details (for now), here is what happen, summarized and illustrated by pictures because it is by giving knowledge that you change the world! If people would know more about everything that happens to the coffee before they get to drink it at home or at their local shop, I am pretty sure it would have an influence on the quality of coffee from the seed. Everything is connected, and talking to coffee producers here makes me even more convinced about it.

So where do the brown powder you use to make coffee come from? No big surprise, coffee grows on a coffee tree! It is actually a shrub not a tree, often growing in the shade of other bigger trees (often fruit trees like banana trees in Costa Rica). On this shrub, the fruits are called coffee cherries, since they look like cherries. To sum up, the higher the coffee grows the better.

There are many types of coffee plants, but only two of them are used to make coffee: Coffea canephora (robusta is one sort) and coffea Arabica. Costa Rica is known for a reason for the quality of its coffee. It is (in theory) legally forbidden to grow robusta species here since it is coffee of a much lower quality (it means it is more bitter and has less delicate flavours than Arabica varietals, it also contains more caffeine). Then again, researches are being held about those facts). Everything I say here concerns the Arabica type and I took all the photos in Costa Rica in the Tarrazu province.

Here is a small field of young coffee shrubs. Since the best coffee usually grows quite high up, it usually is in beautiful areas in the mountains (but not only).

 This is what a coffee plantation usually looks like in Tarrazu, Costa Rica (here in an organic plantation). You can see a banana tree on the left hand side (yes right, the one with bananas hanging), surrounded by lemon trees, clementine trees or guava trees.

Just like wine, there are several coffee varietals that won’t taste the same and can be really different (the taste also depends on a few variables like altitude, the composition of the soil, the climate and the way it is roasted and brewed).

The green coffee cherries you can see on the photo are not ready to be picked because obviously they are not ripe. Most of the varietals are red when ripe, but they can also be yellow like you see in the middle. To make quality coffee, just like to make a good jam, you should only use ripe cherries, which is often a challenge, but I’ll get back to it.

 Here are two coffee cherries, a yellow one and a red one. Those are two different varietals, one is a yellow catuai, the other one a caturra. In Costa Rica, both varietals are often mixed in the plantation.

Here is what you see when you open a coffee cherry in two.  There are most of the times two beans in a cherry, facing each other. As you can see, it is inside the fruit flesh and the skin.

The fruit is not really good when eaten raw, it is quite bitter and not super sweet, but it does smell really good to me, something like a sweet flower smell and a red berry.

If you squeeze the cherry, the beans will come out. Usually there are two against each other, more rarely three like on the right hand side of the picture. When the beans are taken out of the cherry, they are covered by a sticky layer that is usually removed.

To remove the gluey layer, the beans are washed to prevent fermentation. Well, obviously, not this way. But I’ll get back to it more in details; it’s more complicated than that, there are other options.

Once they’ve been washed, look at the difference: on the left side, the beans look quite smooth, whereas on the right hand side, they still look more shiny, don’t they?

Anyway, at this point, the beans are still not quite ready to be roasted because they are too humid (around 20 to 24). They need to be dried, and that is a very important step (again, I’ll get back to it later) but to sum up, one option is to spread them  on the floor to let them dry in the sun and the wind until the humidity goes down to 9,5 to 10,5%. At that point, the green coffee is imprisoned inside a thin dry layer like a shell called parchment that will be removed before roasting. But we’ll talk about this later.

That’s all for today, I hope you found this as interesting and fun as I do. Please please please let me know if you have any question or remark!

And keep in mind that if you drink a really good cup of coffee, that is the result of a long process involving many expert individuals, taking important decisions at decisive steps. That’s the reason why I am spending time in a producing country, to think more in terms of “savoir faire” like we say in French, which literally means “know do”, sort of like skills,  than processes like we usually talk about in the coffee world. But again, I’ll get back to it!