 Your visit starts with a unique demostration on how to weave a picker's basket using "bejuco", a natural fiber that comes from a vine from the rainforest.
 This is a lost tradition that we are keeping alive by employing Orlando Brizuela, the only artisan left in the valley that still works this incredible craft. Mr Brizuela carries on a demonstration on how to weave the traditional picker's basket and gladly welcomes people who want to join in and weave.
 If your visit takes place between late December and Early April, you will then be fitted with a traditional picker's basket and led by Aracelly to
the field, just around the house. The coffee you pick will be measured and turned over to the cooperative for production.
 After a cool glass of fresh made lemonade, you walk 50 feet to visit our small nursery where the sprouts that renew our plantation are grown. Santos is one of only 5 people in the valley who still produces his own baby coffee trees and is personally involved in the process, all the way from the selection of the seeds.
As with the basket weaving and the picking of the coffee, you will be encouraged to work in Santos´s nursery.
You can weed out the nursery or plant the sprouts for the new batch of baby coffee trees. These activities depend on the time of your visit but rest assured, you will always have something to do.
 We then go to the “parijuelas” where the coffee is sun dried. Here you turn over the coffee, select the very few bad beans in them, and learn the importance of the drying process, specially the role of sun light in shaping an outstanding flavor in coffee.
Tío Ramón's house is the next step in the visit. Built by Santos' father in 1930, this house is still home to original furnishings from the late 19 th and early 20 th centuries.
 While in the house, we will roast coffee in a 70 year old wood burning stove using a turn of the century hand roaster.
 Then, we will grind the fresh-roasted coffee beans in a grinding machine dating from 1875.
 The final stage prior to the tasting is the brewing of the coffee that we just ground. Old fashioned Costa Rican bewing bags are used for each of the three roasts.
 To top it off, we will sit with the Cordoba 's at their kitchen and enjoy a sample of fresh brewed Light, Medium and Dark roasts, plus coffee liqueurs and chocolate-covered coffee beans.
Depending on the time of your visit, you might start off with lunch or take it at the end. Our lunch features all organic ingredients and is cooked on the wood burning stove by Dora Cordoba, Santos'
youngest daughter, and her husband Fernando. |
