Guatemala Day 9: Coffee Museum

We spent a beautiful morning at the Centro Cultural la Azotea, sandwiched between the city of Antigua and the base of the mountain.

First came the coffee museum, but our tour kind of went backwards in time, so I am going to reverse the order of some of the pictures to take you through the process more or less. Less because I don’t remember everything!!

Unfortunately, I failed to take a picture of the baby plants. They are about three years old before they blossom for the first time. This plantation plants the coffee trees under taller to trees to give shade and let the “cherries,” as the coffee fruit is called, develop more slowly. Banana plants are scattered throughout the plantation. They harvest the bananas as well, but the main reason is that banana plants store water during the rainy season and release it back into the soil in dry season. Very clever, to my thinking.

We are in the midst of harvest right now (December to March), but this is how the coffee looks as it ripens.

Harvest is still a labor-intensive, by-hand process. The harvested cherries are weighed and dumped through these bars into a bath. Cherries that aren't yet ripe float and are skimmed off for separate processing.

If you roll the cherry in your palm to soften it and then squeeze it lightly, you get first a sweet acidic juice and then the seeds. The plantation does this by machine in a wet process.

The beans are spread in the sun to dry for several days and turned regularly with the rake you see standing up here. The dark beans in the foreground are those that were under-ripe and need special treatment. Not sure if these are the ones that get made into instant coffee, but Guillermo definitely said it was the rejects that go into that. Steve would tell you that explains a lot.

Sacks of dried, unroasted, coffee can be stored for a couple years without losing quality.

The beans have to be sorted for size before they are roasted because otherwise they won't roast at the same rate. According to Guillermo, the darker the roast, the less caffeine. He calls it "burned coffee," but then he likes the instant he grew up on, so he lost credibility with most of us.

Besides the tour, a small museum explained the process and a little about the family that has owned this plantation for a hundred years. It is an interesting story of German immigrants and Mayas and a matriarchal lineage system. The present owner is the one who came up with the idea of brining in tourists to supplement the coffee income. 

Our tour ended with a demitasse of coffee and of course, a gift shop.

Then we crossed the courtyard to the music museum in the next post. [I'm tired, so I won't get that up until morning, but it included a fabulous performance by four brothers.