Well, this is the rest of the local coffee story as I know it.
The last episode ended with the freshly picked coffee beans being driven away from the coffee fields in 25-30Kg sacks, in the back of terribly overloaded pickup trucks at the end of each day.
Those pickup trucks converge on a bunch of small coffee processing plants (called "beneficios") where the coffee berries are processed to get at the coffee beans.
There are about four or five of these little processing plants located in the town of SanPedro and they are running through the night pretty much everyday.
The berries are first dumped out of their sacks into large concrete holding tanks (We are talking about 25-30 cubic meters of coffee berries here). The berries are then covered with water and left to stand for a few hours (6-8?). This is so that the berry "meat" and skin get absolutely as soft and water logged as possible.
The berries are then fed into the processing machine which is a large mechanical beast and to be honest I have not seen their inner workings but their function is clear...
They remove the soft skin and meat of the berries from the hard beans inside.
It seems that the process is a mechanical version of squeezing the berries between your fingers so that the bean slides out from inside. This is easy for the nice juicy ripe beans but not so easy with the less ripe ones and so some of the skins stay on... I think they pass the beans through the machine a couple of times, but there are still some that "dont want to play the game"...but they are all mixed together at this stage.
The skins are removed from the system at this stage and dumped in great piles outside the coffee processing plants. There is so much of this stuff that they employ a person throughout the day to shovel the berry skins away from the end of the auger to make room for the next days skins... Not one of those jobs that I would really want!
Anyway, the skins just accumulate there in a massive heap throughout the picking season and of course they "compost" themselves and there is a constant smell of decaying coffee bean skins during picking season. It is a sour smell but not like any other I know so its hard to describe...It is somewhat unpleasant when you first smell it but you do get used to it.
Once the picking season is over, these composted skins are shoveled back into sacks and carted back to the coffee fields in the backs of the same pickup trucks that brought them to town, and they are then spread under the coffee bushes as fertilizer for next season.
Back to the coffee beans.
Well, they are again left in those concrete holding tanks and flooded with water. Again they are left for hours so that the residue of the meat (which is full of sugar) dissolves into the water and the beans are no longer covered with a slimy layer.
Then (and this happens in the morning of the next day), the bean/water mix is pumped up and let run through a sluice of about 10m in length. This is where the good (skinless) beans and the bad (still in their skins) beans get separated. It seems that, over the length of the sluice, the good beans sink and the bad beans float.
So after a while, there is a sluice full of good beans and a pile of bad beans back in the holding tanks.
At this point, the good beans are scooped back into bags and taken away on those pickup trucks to drying fields...and in fact the same is done for the bad beans but they are kept seperate.
The drying fields are either large areas of flat concrete or just bare ground covered in big sheets of black poly plastic. The good and bad beans are clear at this stage by the amount of skins in the mix.
Here the beans are spread out in the sun and raked around for a day or three where they dry out. Then once more, they are scooped back into the bags and loaded onto large trucks that take them off to be given a light roast by the big coffee exporters. I assume (but dont know for sure) that the bad beans are also processed similarly but kept local rather than exported.
There are plenty of small bean roasters around the place here in town, and the local coffee is easy to buy (and nice to drink) but I dont know where the beans are taken to or what happens after they leave here.
I do know that the true origin of the beans is lost immediately that they are picked and that at best, beans can be tracked back to their local region (say 10Km square or so) which is not at all like wine grapes...
And thats the story as far as I know it.
