Espiritu Santo Coffee Tour

On our second coffee plantation tour, we went to Espiritu Santo Coffee Plantation. Espiritu Santo translates to “Holy Spirit” in Spanish. This is a beautiful 640 acre all organic plantation that our Bryant Sustainability Marketing class had the pleasure to see and learn more about this plantation. The one thing that made this coffee plantation stand out from the others was the participation of our class in showing us how to harvest the coffee beans.

Our guide, Jose, let some students partake in how the coffee beans are planted, grown, and harvested. We were lucky to have arrived on such a beautiful sunny day for this outdoor adventure.

One thing you may know is that Costa Rican coffee is different from other coffees because of the climate and rich soils. At Espiritu Santo all coffee beans are harvested by hand and to stay sustainable they cut down the older coffee trees and just leave them there in the field so the soil can take the nutrients from the older trees. Each seed has 1-2 coffee beans in each coffee cherry. It takes approximately seven months for the coffee trees to grow.

Fun Facts:

·        Espiritu Santo sells their coffee beans to Green Mountain, Pete’s, Whole Foods, Starbucks, and much more.

·        2,000-3,000 coffee trees for 1 acre of land

·        They keeps trees that produce black beans to shade the coffee beans so when the leaves fall it gives the soil nitrogen

·        Only 5% of the coffee is roasted at Espiritu Santo the rest is shipped unroasted to distributors  

·        500 pounds of coffee cherries make only 80 pounds of roasted coffee

Espiritu Santo is a community that was born and raised to produce coffee because that’s all they know. Our experience at this coffee farm felt very much like a community rather than just employees. The coffee was so delicious I had to buy coffee grinds.

  

Watch as we learned how to make and pour Costa Rican coffee!

For more information:

Website: http://www.espiritusantocoffeetour.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/escoffeetour

- Courtney Smith (@courtneyjane941)