8.23.2009

Barista at Large

Visiting coffee origin is something we’ve been looking forward to for a very long time. Through winding mountain roads and beautiful landscapes, the Banana Dang team finally made it to Sandra Farms Coffee in Adjuntas, PR for our first visit to origin. The air in these mountains is sweet smelling and dryer than the tropical humid beaches of Rincon.

At Sandra Farms, Israel and Sandra Gonzalez greeted us with a snack of local cheeses, guava paste and organic farm grown tomatoes. Lemonade and orange juice were fresh from the trees and the coffee, of course, was delicious.

Israel and Sandra gave us a history of the farm and walked through the process of farming and producing their specialty coffee. Along the vast coffee fields we saw orange, papaya, lemon, sugarcane, avocado and cherry trees. It was not harvest time so the coffee cherries were green, but plentiful.

After our visit to Sandra Farms, we drove another 20-minutes through the mountains of Adjuntas to arrive at Hacienda Monte Alto. We met Don Jimmy and family who showed us the amazing coffee processing setup on the Hacienda. Monte Alto had been producing coffee for over 30 years and it was amazing to see the processing on a larger scale. Alongside the commercial grade coffee was a completely separate specialty coffee processing system. We got another review of the care that goes into Specialty Coffee processing. Smaller batches of the highest quality beans were washed, sorted then dried.

We picked up some coffee and got to enjoy the smell of fresh coffee along the drive home. Visiting origin is a great education for any barista and coffee retailer. It gave us even more of an appreciation for what we serve to our customers every day.