Our site Trinidad is one of many coffee-towns in Honduras. Café is the most important agricultural product in Honduras and is the dominant source of income in Trinidad and the surrounding communities. Typically grown in mountainous terrain, as higher elevation usually equates to a higher quality bean, every mountain farm around Trinidad grows coffee. From the end of November until some time in March is the cosecha or the harvest. It is the busiest time of year for everyone.
The campesinos, farm workers, spend all day hand picking (“cutting”) the coffee from the tree. When the fruit is ripe it turns red and the bean inside is ready to be picked and processed. Usually, the grape or fruit that encapsulates the bean is washed off before the wet beans are brought down the mountain to town. This is done by mechanically agitating the grape while running water over it until the pulp is washed away. This unused pulp is usually discharged freely to streams where fermentation takes place causing the pH of the stream to drop detrimentally low and causing a foul odor and poor water quality. More responsible farms store this waste material in maturation ponds until it has decomposed enough to be used as fertilizer.
Once clean, the wet beans are put in sacks of up to 140 lbs. to be hauled down the mountain by pickup truck for further processing. Many farm owners, cafeteleros, sell their wet beans to a local distributor who dries the beans, usually outdoors in full sun, and then finds a larger buyer who will transport the beans to the north coast for exportation. In Trinidad a group of farmers collectively started a coffee cooperative to help manage the processing, marketing, and distribution of their coffee.
Kristi and I live about 100 feet from the cooperativa de café. Sometime around 5am, large industrial bean dryers crank up and don’t shut down until 10pm. At first the noise was quite annoying, but as with many things, we have become accustomed to it. Hell, by the time coffee season comes to a close, I probably won’t be able to sleep without it!
I buy my coffee at the coop, so on a recent visit, Kristi and I toted our camera to take a few pictures so that we could share a bit about the coffee industry (pre-Starbucks).
As mentioned before, coffee is grown on trees in the form of a grape. When ripe the grape turns from green to red and is ready to be “cut” or picked from the tree.
Next, the coffee is “washed” of grape before being transported down the mountain to the coop where the wet bean is weighed and the farmer is paid by weight at an agreed upon price per 100 lbs. The coffee is now property of the coop. Farmers pay a fee to be a member of the coop. Membership includes processing, packing, marketing, and distribution. The advantage is usually a higher price than the farmer would have gotten if he sold his bean to a small distributor directly.
At the coop, coffee is dried either in the sun or by large industrial dryers. Some buyers (large distributors) prefer one method over the other.
The dried beans are weighed and packaged into 100 lb. sacks. The sacks are categorized by buyer and stored on-site in a warehouse. Buyers come with semi-trucks to haul the sacks to Puerto Cortés where the dried bean is shipped all over the world by international distributors. The bean is almost always shipped dry, not toasted; toasting is usually done in the importing country. The beans have already changed hands several times by the time they leave Honduras only to be sold and resold on the international market.
A unique feature of the coop is a local business that buys the higher quality beans brought to the coop before they are shipped to the coast then around the globe. Café Triniteco buys dried beans from the coop and sorts, toasts, grinds, and packages the coffee right there in the same facility as the coop. This is the same coffee that our families and friends enjoyed over Christmas when we came home for the holidays.
A coffee picker in Honduras makes between $3.00 and $5.00 a day.
100 lbs. of dried beans is bought from the local farmer for about $200 to $300 ($2.00 to $3.00/lb).
I buy Café Triniteco for about $3.00/lb.
A pound of Central American coffee is sold in the U.S. for between $5 and $10.
Very interesting post David 🙂 and great pictures too! Enjoyed reading about the coffee industry. HK & Kelly really enjoyed receiving it and drinking it here.
Oh yeah…it was awesome! Unfortunately, it is gone. However, in August, I’ll get some more!! Love ya’ll.
FRom my Colombian experience that first trip is done by burro (Juan Valdez’s). I do always buy a local brand for myself and as gifts.
Hey hey, Jeff. Good to hear from you. Hope you are well.
Interesting. Really liked the coffee and look forward to more.
I am not a big coffee drinking but I like having a cup every once in a while but I had no idea that a coffee bean originally had a grape-like fruit around it! I don’t know where I thought it came from (I guess I was envisioning a small tree with little beans or bean pods all over it). You learn something new every day!
I’ll take a grande mocha latte.
No café for you!
Hi David,
I have a pound of Cafe Triniteco in my posession and was wondering if these beans were arabica or robusta. Just curious since in only says 100% pure coffee on the packaging.
Thanks,
Sean
Sean, Looks like Arabica. Check out this website for some more information on the Trinidad cooperative:
http://www.goodinside.jp/index.php?pageID=141&subID=11300
-Kristi
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