Coffee: From Seed to Cup and the People In Between

Everyone I spoke to about the Allegro Origin trip told me that it would change my whole outlook on coffee. They said that no matter how passionate I was about it, no matter how amazing I found it, no matter the admiration I felt for the people who grow and process coffee for us, that was nothing compared to how I would feel after I had seen it for myself.

They were right.

I was fortunate to be selected to attend this year’s Origin trip to Costa Rica, where we visited the Las Lomas and Sumava coffee farms. These are family farms, handed down through generations. They grow small and micro-lot coffees, focused on quality over quantity. We met the owners of these farms, and one introduced us to her son, who had stayed with her to take over the farm when she is done. Their pride in their work was nearly palpable; she never stopped smiling and he stood straighter when he spoke about his work. The farms cover volcanic ground at higher elevations, where the coffee grows sweeter. Like all farms, they encounter challenges: winds can reach speeds of 150 km/hr, which damage and even strip the leaves from coffee trees, and the difficult balance of keeping enough nitrogen in the ground requires them to plant other trees, like lemons and bananas. Still, the volcanic soil is rich and the coffee trees grow well. We were able to walk among them, and in some places they grew so thickly that we could barely see from one row to the next. Our guide let us taste the cherries right from the branch. The skin was tough and chewy; the fruit so light it seemed barely there. They tasted bland and just a little sweet, a little like watery guava, but grew bitter when chewed too long. The seeds inside were slick, small, and pale. It was hard to imagine them becoming the coffee beans we all know and love. All of the coffee cherries on these farms is picked by hand, one by one, to ensure that only the ripest purple-red cherries come off the branch.

We also visited both wet and dry mills, where coffee cherries are turned into green coffee beans – just one step from the roasted coffee beans ready to serve; the roasting happens after the beans are sourced and sold to coffee companies like Allegro. Milling the coffee is a long and delicate process. In the wet mill, the cherry is stripped from the seed – the coffee bean – using fermentation, water, and a series of machines. Too little fermentation and the cherry is difficult to remove; too much, and the coffee will taste wrong. The air in the mill was thick with the scent of earth and the sweet dryness of the cherry skins. It was loud in the mill, a combination of flowing water and machinery, and it was difficult to tell what part of the process happened first – a series of pipes and chutes shuttled the cherries from place to place, to every side of the walkways and ladders, above and below and all around. The beans were laid out to dry on large beds, turned frequently to avoid mold or baking in the sun. We were encouraged to touch them, to turn them by hand, and they were faintly sticky and warm and smelled musty-sweet.

After drying, the seeds are handed off to the dry mill – we visited the Exclusive Coffee dry mill. There, the beans are stripped of parchment, the very fine skin surrounding the seed, and packed for shipping. This particular dry mill is very small; Exclusive Coffee was created to fill a niche in Costa Rica: microlot coffees that would otherwise be mixed in with larger batches, cutting costs but diminishing the quality of the final cup. They roast and taste samples on-site, to check quality and help the farmers improve their crops and enter competitions. Despite its small size, Exclusive Coffee mills an impressive amount of coffee – it features two warehouses that can be filled with coffee, floor to ceiling. We visited them during the beginning of the harvest season, so these rooms were mostly empty, but even then, seeing the sheer number of coffee beans in each bag, knowing those beans came from hand-picked cherries, and imagining those two rooms stacked full of coffee, was incredibly humbling.

There is no limit on things to learn about coffee, but what impressed upon me the most during the Origin trip was this: every person we spoke to, from the farmers to the owner of Exclusive Coffee, was so passionate about and so proud of what they do. The amount of labor that goes into crafting a single cup of coffee, as the beans change hands from farmer to processor to packager to sourcer to roaster to baristas like me, is immense and intensive. Coffee is about people, and the stories we share. Every cup brings us together, from New York to Colorado to Costa Rica and beyond.