Adventures in Central America: Finca Filadelfia, Guatemala

I got back into Antigua from Volcan Pacaya at 12:30, late because traffic was awful again.  The condition of some of the highways I have been on in Guatemala have reminded me of those in Mongolia and North Korea (i.e., awful), but at least in those countries there was no traffic!  To be fair to Guatemala, though, the Pan-American Highway seems excellent (both in terms of condition and traffic), and maybe parts of other ones too.

Back in Antigua, I wanted to try to get on a tour of Finca Filadelfia, one of Guatemala's oldest coffee plantations just outside of Antigua.  The final tour of the day is at 13:20, and I still wanted some lunch, to drop things off at my hostel, and get laundry to the laundry lady next door.

I managed to do all but get anything resembling a decent lunch.  Instead I settled for a couple of mangos and a papaya from a lady on the street corner.

Then I joined a group waiting for the Finca Filadelfia "shuttle:"

The plantation doubles as a hotel/resort/restaurant and so on, and I am guessing that maybe more of their revenue comes from tourism than coffee.  Nonetheless, it is one of Guatemala's oldest coffee plantations, going back to the late 19th century when coffee was first introduced as a cash crop.

We began our tour in the nursery, where the coffee plants spend the first two years of their lives.  Interestingly, the coffee plants are a graft between arabica "tops" and robusta roots--because robusta has stronger roots, but apparently arabica is generally seen as having superior taste.  The plants are hand grafted elsewhere, then transported to the nursery.

Here we were also told about the "rust" coffee plantations are dealing with that eats away at the leaves and ultimately kills the plant.  It was not hard to find affected leaves.

From the nursery we drove further to where the "adult" bushes are growing.

Here we got to pick a coffee bean and "shell" it.  

 

I have to say I was quite impressed with this tour, it was very informative and the guide could answer every question--including one about how much the coffee pickers get paid.  Finca Filadelfia is part of a cooperative that supposedly ensures pickers are paid fair wages.  They are paid by the pound, and according to our guide, the daily wage is usually $8-12 US!

From the field we headed inside, to where the picked beans are first processed (mostly this involves removing the outer shell and then starting the drying process).

Eventually the premium beans end up outside, where they are dried in the sun for two weeks.

Once dried, the final shells are shaken off, leaving just the dry coffee bean.  The dry beans get put into sacks for storage or export.  

Domestic customers can either buy the beans as is, or have them roasted (and ground) to order.  

Of course, the tour ended with a fresh cup of coffee in Finca Filadelfia's lab, where they do tasting and some minor experimenting, and after that we were driven back into Antigua in one of the big green trucks.