Boquete - Week 17

Jan 1st - 3rd 2007

Well, check this out, James has allowed me to write in the blog!
Guest Writer Ally here.

New Years Day we managed to drag ourselves out of bed and be at the Water Taxi stand for 10am! Even with Katie´s usual ´hangover sickness´ we enjoyed a beautiful sunny (first) day trip over the Caribbean Sea back to mainland Panama. The scenery was AMAZING.
Arriving in Almirante we started the 1km trek to the nearest bus stop. The Panamanians are very caring people and before we knew it we had an offer of a lift to a safer bus stop further out of town - CHECK! You don´t get offers like that every day so Katie and I, with a couple of Canucks, piled into the cabin of the 4x4.... and James in the open truck with the backpacks!

Weather was blue sky and hot and so off we went on, in the words of James ´the least stressful day of travelling in Central America´. Not only did this guy take us to the nearest bus station, he then offered to take us to a town called David, a three hour drive away!

The road led us high up into the moutains overlooking Costa Rica and Panama and soon we were in the clouds.... poor James out there in the cold and wet, tee hee hee! (We were more concerned about our bags!). Inside the A/C cabin us girls enjoyed singing along to Coldplay blaring out of the CD player, very surreal.

Arriving in David our ´chauffeur´ dropped us off to the Chicken Bus Station, for a less pleasant drive up into the mountains to Boquete, even offering to take us to a party that evening.... which we declined owing to New Year celebrations catching up on us!

Next morning, we took ourselves off to a local Coffee plantation, Cafe Ruiz. A four hour tour later we are now Coffee connisseurs and will never drink NoEsCafe again! I´ll pass you over to James to go through each process in refined detail, with photos!

The coffee beans in the fields. Coffee only grows between 1100m and 1500m altitude. The beans must ripen and be picked only when they have turned red. Most large scale productions strip the beans from the bushes by machine taking both green and red beans. Cafe Ruiz hand pick their beans leaving the green ones on the bush till they turn red. Fruit trees are planted between the bushes to attract insects and parasites to the fruit and away from the coffee beans.

Next stage is to put the beans in a floatation tank, the beans that float are unripe or bad and so are separated and named floaters!! These beans are inferior, bitter and get sold on to instant coffee makers, ending up as NoEsCafe. The beans are picked by indigenous workers who hand pick about 60kgs of beans a day for $20. They have all their accomodation, schooling, healthcare and fruit they can eat provided free by Cafe Ruiz.

The third stage is to ferment the beans for 24hrs to loosen the outercasing and disolve the pulp around the beans. The casings are kept and used as fertilizer in the fields. Nothing is wasted - very sustainable.

The beans are then washed and pre-dried. The beans are still over 50% water at this stage.

The darker beans drying in the foreground are the unripe floaters. The coffee beans before going into the driers.

The large drying machines. The beans are dried in these big drums for 36 hours to remove all the remaining moisture. The beans are then rested for 4 months before going on to be graded.

The three sections of bean. The outer casing on the left and a thin skin covering the bean. Both of these are removed and burnt to providing heat for the driers.

The fires burning the casing along with branches cut from oversized fruit trees.

The grading machine. The beans are graded according to size, shape, density and colour. The beans are they bagged for selling as "oro cafe" or gold coffee. The coffee produced by Cafe Ruiz has won many awards and can be worth up to $50 a lb!! The beans are sold unroasted so companies like Starbucks can make blended coffee, adding these high quality beans to lesser quality beans brought cheaply elswhere to improve the overall flavour once roasted.

Apparently we needed to wear these in the roasting area, seems like they just wanted to make the tourists look silly to me...

The beans on the left have been well graded and therefore are an even colour after roasting. The ones on the right haven´t been well selected and that is why you can see the smaller beans over roasted (black and bitter) and the larger beans under roasted (lighter and sweeter tasting).

The tasting session told us that what we think of strong coffee, very intense and bitter, is just a result of roasting the beans longer giving them a burnt taste. A good cup of coffee should not need milk and sugar to alter the taste. A well selected medium roast (latino) is lighter and uniform in colour and will taste sweeter. You will taste sweetness in the front of your mouth, and bitterness in the back. Also the bitter flavour will diminish quickly while the sweeter flavour will last many minutes. The strength comes simply from the ratio of coffee to water used.

The way to know if you have an even, medium roast is to look at the beans before they are roasted. If you buy coffee ready ground you will never see the quality of the beans used in the first place, always buy beans whole and grind them yourself. This also ensures that the beans are as fresh as possible. Another tip they gave us was that foil coffee bags have a one-way valve on the front to squeeze out the air once you have resealed the bag - we never knew that!!

End of coffee lecture, sorry if anyone dropped off there...

We also managed to fit in a peculiar attraction up here in the mountains, ´My Garden, Your Garden´.... clearly someone has too much spare cash and time on their hands when they create an open garden with pink flamingoes, windmills, wooden female figures in various positions (painting lamposts, sunbathing etc) and even a small church complete with pews! This did amuse us for a few hours!

Crazy - the owners must be on drugs!

January 3rd saw us in need of working off some Xmas and New Year excesses with a hike in the rain forest. Though the Volcano 11 hour gruelling hike was tempting we opted for the 3 and a half hour trek with Eduardo, a local guide.

Bananas for the walk - 1.5p each

We climbed from 1080 metres (Boquete altitude) to 2100 metres, from warm breeze to chillier wind! Scenery was as ever beautiful, and we got to see lots of local wildlife.... though unfortunately not the elusive Quetzal bird! Katie and James have tried to see the elusive Quetzal on three occasions, but the little critter is a bit shy. Eduardo took us on an alternative route on the way back, scrabbling up the valley side. Good exercise but we'll have to wait to and see how our legs feel tomorrow!

The elusive Quetzal

A 800 year old Ash Tree.

Tomorrow we´re going to head to the Penonome for cigars and Panama Hats, then the Pacific Coast of Panama to get some beach action in.... yay!

A blog entry wouldn't be complete without a bizzare photo of local signage. Not sure why babies need protection with Durex...