In the afternoon, we booked a tour of El Trapiche, a small family-owned coffee and sugarcane plantation. I learned that in all of Costa Rica, coffee farmers exclusively produce Arabica coffee. The guide explained that the government passed a law at the end of the eighties to make all farmers switch to Arabica. The purpose behind this is that due to its small size Costa Rica cannot compete on quantity on the world market. Since Arabica coffee is deemed to be of higher quality than Robusta, the move towards Arabica was done to be able to compete on quality instead.
I learned another thing about gourmet coffee that I hadn't known so far. Coffee fruits can develop beans with one, two or three parts inside. If there's only one part, in about 5% of all fruits, the bean is called a peaberry, and yields much higher prices. This is the machine to separate peaberries from other beans of different sizes:
It works like this: you pour the beans on top, the machine vibrates, and so the round peaberries stay on top, while the thinner two-seed beans fall through to the lower layers. Simple, but effective.
The second part of the tour concerned sugarcane. We visited some part of the plantation - as with so many agricultural crops, hybrids (that combine the advantages of several natural varieties) are used for production. In the case of sugarcane, the favored traits are size and sweetness, of course. We were also given some fresh sugarcane to chew. The fiber tastes more or less neutral, and so you only chew on the cane to extract the sugarcane juice - which is really yummy! This is a bit of peeled sugarcane:
From the plantation back to the main buildings, we rode in a traditional Costa Rican ox cart. In times past, everything was transported by ox carts, and they were also the only way to found new settlements. I have to say, I admire the adventure spirit of these people! Ox carts are bumpy rides, to say the least.
Next to pulling ox carts, the oxen also had the task of powering the trapiche - the sugarcane press. (Interestingly enough, there is no English Wikipedia page for trapiche, just a Spanish one.) Oxen have to be specially trained for this task since it's not as easy as it looks: the ox on the inner side has to walk more slowly than the one on the outside, for example. The oxen also know when to start walking and when to stop. In our small demonstration, they stopped walking the second there was no more sugarcane to go into the press.
To make sugar or sweets from sugarcane juice, the juice first has to be boiled. To make fresh brown sugar, the boiling juice is poured into small molds and left there to cool slowly. To make sweets, for example fudge, the boiling juice is poured onto a surface. There all kinds of flavors can be added - chocolate, peanuts, coconut, etc. - and then the mass is stirred to cool it down quickly. So that's the only difference between brown sugar and fudge: how fast you make it cool down after boiling. This is the fudge-in-making that we made ourselves during the tour - it has chocolate and peanuts in it:
One last interesting thing I learned on the tour concerned this plant:
In case you don't know (like myself before the tour): it's a tobacco plant. The guide gave us small bits of its leaves to taste. They didn't taste anything like the flavor we know from cigars and cigarettes since that flavor comes from the fermentation process after the harvest. Instead, the leaves tasted spicy, very much like fresh pepper. Fascinating!
