Ker-plink, ker-plank, ker-plunk, aka: picking coffee in Colombia

October 15-November 3, 2015

Somewhere in history someone said 'Hey, you know what? Let's pick these little red fruits. But lets not eat the fruit, nah, let's take the seeds, dry them, roast them, grind them into a powder, pour boiling water over it and drink the toasted-seed-powder-water. Yeah, let's do that'

But people liked it (for reasons unbeknownst to me) and now its an industry.

For the last two weeks I've been helping out on a coffee farm outside San Augustín, Colombia. At the end of each year is the coffee harvest, so helping pick coffee was one of the things I did.

I was so excited to be useful my first day picking

Its kind of like picking blackberries, only less thorns, your clothes don't get stained purple, and I had absolutely no desire to munch while picking. Also you're picking from bushes and trees rather than vines, the berries don't really want to come off, and you want the dried and going bad ones too. So really I guess its not like picking blackberries at all, except for the putting things in your bucket. And that could be said for any type of berry picking.

First day in the jungle below the house.  Not the real fields, I found out.  Just a couple of plants.

Some was more shaded, some was less. Some was on steep hillside. But everywhere was the same that you wanted to strip the whole bush of anything not green, or the muddy brown that comes just after green on the way to red.

I settled on my picking outfit after the first day.

I felt kind of like an ewok.

But it kept the sun off, I had very little to fear from branches thwacking me in the face, my one headphone I had in couldn't get pulled put by branches, and I was bug protected.

The view while picking through the tops of bushes

There were nasty little suckers that looked like fruit flies and bit like horseflies. They left a little blood drop and itched like crazy. Luckily I got through the phase of wanting to cut off both legs at the knees to stop the itching without doing anything rash.

I also did some watering plants, aka filling up a wheelbarrow to haul water out to the garden, a bit of cooking, dug yucca one day with my host mom and learned how to peel it (kinda like prying bark off a really weird potato), and helped with the rest of the coffee process.

This is the only picture of yucca I've got. It was from the festival in town later in the post. These were the contest entered ones.

First comes sticking all the berries in a big hopper and shelling them to get the beans out.

broom for scale

It makes a huge pile of peel/shells that get wheel-barrowed to a pile to compost. And they don't smell good. Especially after a couple days sitting.

Beans go from giant hopper in the house above to the small hopper on the machine.  Then there's a cheese-grater kinda wheel that turns to get the beans out.  Shells go out back (pile in bottom left corner) and beans come out the front into the big water tank, through the green round spinney thing that drops beans through and spits things that sneaked through out the end.

They sit in water at least overnight, (not sure why) then get let into the trough.

There they get stirred around with more water, and the beans that are bad, still have some shell, sneaked through the machine get scooped off the top to get hand sorted. The rest get spread in the drying room. Kinda like in Peru (that post here) there's big flat areas to rake beans, but everything was covered here. Torrential downpours happened with too great a frequency for open air drying.

Once dry, the beans got swept back up and bagged for selling in town.

After we swept up all the beans in the back half of the tent.  Johana has the bags we then shoveled all the beans into.

14.5 bags in all, each weighs about 50kg, or 110lbs

Other things that happened:

There was a marble quarry a 45 min walk down the road. I drove past it with Edimer one day when we visited his aunt on the other side of the valley. When I walked there myself for pictures, a downpour started 2/3 of the way there, and I was mostly dry upon arrival back home. I took a couple photos but didn't linger.

Looking upstream to the quarry

The view downstream

Also at the aunts house I helped bake half a billion rolls.

They didn't say no to another willing pair of hands. It was in a wood fired oven. I think I would have burnt everything to a crisp for a while before figuring out temperature control. She fed small strips of wood in, which probably was easier to regulate than big chunks of wood.

My host sister made these sweet houses out of recycled cardboard, styrofoam, toothpicks, etc.

Hot knife from the wood fired stove cuts through styrofoam like...well...a  hot knife.

I helped a little, and the first weekend there was a festival where she entered them in a craft contest and won.

Finished small houses.  I did the windows of a bunch!

This is the puppy they had.

He was cute but thought biting was how you play and puppy teeth are sharp. He also liked to put muddy little puppy feet all over your pants. His name was Tommy, Toby, or Tony and I never figured out which.

There were also parakeets

And rabbits and guinea pigs.  We didn't eat them this time. (see this post for the reference)

There were wild pineapples growing.  We picked a couple and made them into juice.

I went to the San Augustín Archealogical Park, which had a ton of statues they've dug up from prehistoric times, between 0 and 900 AD.  This one was my favorite, and was all over knick-knacks being sold with "San Augustín" written on them.  I think it looks like a penguin sitting on a branch its holding up itself.  I think it's supposed to be an eagle with a snake.  I like penguin better.

There were lots of tombs too, which to me looked a lot like holes with rocks over them.

This guy was another favorite, lil' froggy.

The view from the very top of the park.  This is what happens when you haven't figured out how the panorama mode on your camera works yet.

More success this time.  And a gorgeous view.

This sign cracked me up.  No cars on the path, but feel free to bring your cow.

I ate honey straight out of the comb.  One of their neighbors (also cousins) had bee hives and were taking the honey one night.

Full on beekeeper

They got the trays out of the hive and had to shave the wax off with a machete.

There was also some blobby comb on the edges and stuff.  Once clean the sheets went into a centrifuge, which got spun to drain the honey.

In the comb they cut off, there were also bee larva, and I ate 1.5 of those.  The whole one was actually alive.  Am I doing South America right?

I had a lot of new experiences happen at this farm, and Now there is another family to visit if I ever go back.

Left to right: Iginio, Edimer and Alejandro (aka, Conejo), me, Johana, Laura, and Cerfa.