One of the highlights of a stay in Boquete, in the North West area of Panama, is a tour of a coffee plantation.
Coffee Adventures offer a complete pick-up service and a detailed tour of the Kotowa Plantation, which lasts approx 3 hours. The tour starts out among the coffee trees where you will see, probably for the first time, how small a coffee tree can be, and how the beans develop in an extraordinary way all along the branches. As they develop at different rates, ripening and picking is a continuous process from October to April, but even at the end of May, when I visited, there is still plenty to see.
The guide, Hans van der Vooren, lives on his own coffee plantation “Finca Habbus de Kwie” so his knowledge is first hand and very informative. He tells the story of the Kotowa Plantation from its humble beginnings at the hands of a Canadian ex-Pat, who actually gave up being Mayor of Vancouver and came to Boquete in 1920 to grow coffee, and the business is still run by the same family today.
Following the bean from picking through drying, sorting and roasting is a fascinating tale, and yet it is done with very simple equipment, largely unchanged since coffee first began. Learning about the different beans, the quality and the difference in roasting times (just 30 seconds takes a medium blend to fully roasted), is totally fascinating and Hans is happy to answer all your questions as the tour proceeds through the small buildings.
Equally interesting was seeing how the resident workers live and work. Native Indians are used for labor, and the living conditions they enjoy are award-winning in the country. Despite all the mod-cons such as tap water, many still prefer to wash and bathe in the nearby stream, and continue to fill the houses with acrid smoke whilst cooking! The children all go to school on-site, which cleverly frees up the women to work and earn also. Seeing their colorful traditional dress and watching the children scamper shyly about the fields was an education for us too.
The final part of the tour was spent in the restored cupping room of the original old mill, where we sat inhaling the aroma of freshly brewing coffee. Now we could put into practice our new knowledge as coffee tasters. In the cupping process, we shook the ground coffee around in the cups to inhale the scents, much like in wine tasting. The mild roast certainly had the smell and taste of many fruits. Medium roast produced a more nutty taste, together with caramel and chocolate flavors, and the full roast lost most of the finer tastes in favor of chocolate, but was noticeably smoother.
All that we heard, seen and experienced that morning at Kotowa coffee plantation was an education which will stay with me and hopefully be recalled the next time I choose my beans in Starbucks. And yes, Hans, now I know how to store them and keep them at their best, too!!
