They Don't Know

We are living on a coffee plantation. Most weekday mornings, the small crew of coffee pickers come through the gate, dragging along their nine and eleven-year-old children to play while they pick.

The coffee harvest season begins in December and goes through February. In fact, the school calendar here in Costa Rica starts in February and goes through the end of November because families and children used to be very involved in the harvest. Nowadays, only one out of five workers in the harvest in Costa Rica are from here. The majority are from neighboring Nicaragua and Panama.

After waiting for about four years for new coffee plants to produce, the intensely laborious coffee harvest begins. As the coffee cherries ripen, they turn red. The workers must make several passes through the fields and pick ONLY the ripe ones, leaving the rest for the next pass.

As they pick the coffee, they place the cherries in a basket, and once that basket is full, they take it to get measured in the official measuring box, called a "cajuela." It takes about 30 minutes to fill a cajuela, and the average pay is about $3.70, which means that the coffee pickers make an average of $7.40 an hour.

The other day, I was driving behind an open truck with about 20 workers standing in the back as it bounced along the road. Now, that's a different commute than most of us are used to!

That's just the harvesting. There are six more steps: processing, drying, hulling, sorting and grading, and finally, roasting.

There are different methods (wet, dry, honey), but the goal of processing is to remove the fruit from the cherry, leaving only the beans.

Next, the beans are dried for about six to fourteen days, depending on the weather (and method). I remember walking into a drying house when we were in language school five years ago. It's SO hot in there, you're only allowed to be there for five minutes or less and never alone. (I'm guessing that if you live in Houston, you'd call that "the outdoors" between May and November.)

These dry beans need their parchment or husk layers removed in a hulling machine.

Not every bean makes the cut. Most commercial coffee is sorted by machine, but craft coffee producers do it manually. It's only been in the last decade that Costa Rica has started keeping more and more premium coffee to sell locally. Before that, all the good stuff was exported, and only the lower grade (which is still pretty great) was kept here.

Lastly, the beans are roasted. This is an art all its own. The reason some of us love brewed coffee from Starbucks (which has its only coffee farm in the world, about an hour from where we live) and others describe it as burnt coffee is because of how it's roasted. My friend Dustin Sauder, who owns High Brow Coffee in Franklin, Tennessee, used to serve Cat & Cloud coffee before they started roasting in-house. Cat & Cloud's decaf coffee is called "Friend Zone." Isn't that genius?! (I've often thought that churches serving coffee should name regular "Christian" and decaf "Non-Christian.") 😇

Those of us who are coffee snobs buy beans whole and grind them just before brewing. The rest of you commoners buy your Folgers in a can. However, grinding has a significant role in the end product. I remember from my time working for Starbucks that the four most significant factors influencing how your coffee tastes are proportion (how much coffee), grind (how finely or coarsely it's ground), water (how pure, chlorinated, or filtered it is), and freshness (proper storing of the coffee).

If you don't like coffee, farming, or Costa Rica, yet you read this far, thank you. Here's why I wanted you to know about the intense process it takes from the bean to your cup.

Like a great cup of coffee, the RESULTS of all the work you and your team will do this Christmas season will be appreciated by your congregation. But friends, they have no idea of all the steps, angst, prayer, planning, late nights, sacrifice, questioning, practicing, and rehearsing it took to do that. They may even complain because they wanted cream and sugar, and you're a purist, so to speak.

Give them a break. Love and serve them anyway. They don't know. I mean, do you think about all it took for you to be able to enjoy that cup of coffee?

ps. If you want a 5-minute video showing you the process of coffee, you can watch it here.

-Dave Helmuth
(purchase my book, "Worship Fertilizer: (the first hundred)" HERE)

They Don't Know (Nº 413)