Thursday, May 22 we went to the Britt Coffee Plantation. It was a lot different than the coffee plantation we visited yesterday because this one was designed for ¨touristas¨. As soon as we got off the bus we were given a cold coffee beverage and a tour of the grounds immediately. We were in a group of about 50 people and there were 3 tour guides that explained how all the operations worked in a comedic way with lots of jokes. They told us Arabs were the first ones to put coffee in a stew. The workers there filled their coffee baskets when it was harvest time with about 25 pounds of coffee, but once it was done being processed that 25 pounds would be reduced to only 3.5 pounds. Sometimes they sucked on the juices of the red fruits the coffee, but if you do it too much it would act like a laxative and would not be able to work for a while. Once the red fruits are ripe they must be harvested the same day as picked within 8 hours or else they would over ferment and taste like vinagar. In order to tell the good beans from the bad the workers would drowned them in water, and only the ones that sunk to the bottom were used. They do not have any problem with any insects with the coffee plants, only sometimes fungi. The first step in the process was to put the beans in a machine that squeezed the skins off and the skins got caught in a net and the beans passed on. Next the beans are washed so the second layer of skin falls off. Then they need to dry the beans. They can either do this for free by basking them in the son which takes a fair amount of time, or they have a gas drying chamber that only takes a couple of minutes but costs money and is highly explosive. Now the beans can either be planted or preserved with full freshness for up to a year and a half. The parts of the beans and bad beans will be recycled and used as fertilized with ¨chicken poo¨ for a later crop. To plant the seeds, they plant them in the ground and cover them with one inch of soil and put banana leaves over the top of that. They had banana leaves growing within the coffe plantation for easy accessto the leaves. 8 weeks later they first sprout and open with two leaves. They then tranplant the best ones and put them in the field and take care of them. They have to wait 2 years before the plants start producing fruit. They are all organic operations and can produce fruit for up to 40 years. They have some of the best soil there due to the volcanic action so they do not have to worry about rotating crops to preserve the soil. Coffee Britt also has operations in Chile, Peru, Mexico, and several other countries around the Americas. There were two coffee ¨sins¨ discussed when drinking coffee. Never reuse the coffee grounds and never reheat the coffee. The ¨life¨ of a cup of coffee is about 20 minutes which is the time it takes to cool down. Whe nthey roast the coffee it loses 20% of its weight. It pops like popcorn when it is cooked, and the only difference between a dark and light roast cup of coffee is the time it is in the oven. The longer it is cooked the darker the roast. Good coffee does not change taste from hot to cold. That is why some places serve coffee steaming hot beacase it is most likely a ¨crappy cup of coffee¨. Professionals taste coffee by ¨slurping¨ very loudly to make sure oxygen gets into the taste and also so it sprays on all of the taste regions in the mouth. To make there coffee decafinated, they ship their coffee off to plants in Germany to remove the caffine and send it back to them to be bagges. Germany can then sell the caffine to companies like Coca Cola to be used in their products.