The life of a coffee bean (Sam's supposedly secret birthday present)

Colombia, home of some of the world's finest coffee. I wouldn't be able to even fathom writing this blog entry at 8 am (current time) on a Tues. morning without a hearty dose of the stuff, ahhhhhh. Colombians call black coffee with sugar "tinto", which in other countries means red wine, but I'll take either meaning of the word any time. In honor of the hard working coffee growers everywhere, and to make my sister Sam's cheap birthday present seem more special, I will attempt to blog on how it's grown.

I stayed in the coffee growing region in a town called Salento for about a week. It was a lush green hilly place where cows mooed you awake in the morning and where buckets of rain tend to splash down in the afternoon. One morning the sun came out and I took a little walk down to Don Elias' coffee plantation.

Don Elias looks exactly like the guy in the pictures you see on coffee packaging. He wears the typical hat, has the mustache, and owns his own little organic coffee farm full of banana trees and pineapple plants. He gave me a tour with his beautiful granddaughter. They apparently don't own a digital camera because she liked to pose for pictures and asked to see them later, giggling with delight. She was so darn cute.

First you grab a basket and pick the beans. Some beans are red when they are ripe, some yellow. Don Elias mixes the different kinds, saying they all taste the same. I've heard some are purple too, and the mix looks like Skittles on trees, but Don Elias didn't have any purple ones. He says the banana trees keep the beans from getting too much sunlight.

The beans are put through this contraption that separates the beans from the skins. At this time the beans are white and still covered with a sweet film.

The beans are dried out in the sun for, uh oh, I forget how many days...a week? The sweet film dries and comes off, er, somehow.

When the beans have thoroughly dried, Don Elias toasts them on the stove. This is when they turn black. When ready for a cup of coffee, you grind them...

and Viola! Don Elias doesn't have gas, so he had his grandson start a fire on their wood burning stove for the water.

The granddaughter and her cousin were singing along to Shakira songs while I sipped the best coffee I've ever tasted. I bought a couple bags for Sam's birthday to complement an apparently "surprise" other present from mom that Sam picked out. They were toasted just the day before. I took them to the post office today in Medellin but they were rejected. Hmmm, I might have to try my luck in customs...they might end up being a Christmas present---fingers crossed nothing gets confiscated!

In the meantime, my backpack smells goooooood...!