Last Saturday we went to the Finca Rosa Blanca (White Rose Farm). This place was amazing. They are an organic coffee farm. The guide told us that the final taste isn't incredibly different from a mass-producing coffee farm that uses chemicals, but there is an incredibly attractive green process that they use. What organic means is that they don't use chemical pesticides and fertilizers; everything is natural. There are other fruit trees around that fix nitrogen and potassium in the soil for plant nutrition, and some plants help keep moisture in. Also, the flowers that some of the trees surrounding the coffee plants grow attract lots of birds that eat vicious coffee plant-eating bugs.
I just thought this was funny. This is the van we took to get to the farm (we are a small group). It's basically shouting out to the locals: "Hey look! A bunch of gringos are going to go look at our attractions!"
A shot of the coffee beans. This is a mat where they are sun-dried and sorted through to eliminate the mono-beans and triple-beans. They have some fancy name but I forgot, and apparently they taste different than the normal siamese-bean. Oh, and these are for display purposes so they are totally old and nasty.
The end of the tour: coffee tasting. The key is in the slurp. That's all I'm going to say to you; a true tasting professional takes his secrets to the grave.
Okay, this place is freaking beautiful. You can see my other photos on facebook. It is a hotel, restaurant, and coffee plantation that also grows pineapples and bananas (and various other plants in the compost-fertilized garden they have). I'll probably have my honeymoon here.
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