Learning about Costa Rican Coffee

By Crystal Avila

On our second day in Costa Rica we got to visit one of the stores of Cafe Britt. Our host took us on a tour and showed us all of Cafe Britt and the history of it. While we were visiting we saw many flowers, trees, and some goats. The coffee first started in Ethiopia, then came to Italy in 1615, from there to France in 1660, in 1723 to Martinica, soon after to Brazil in 1727, and finally to Costa Rica in 1750. Back in the day they would work 10 days walking and sometimes with no shoes from 5 in the morning to 2 in the afternoon.

There are around 212 volcanoes but only 6 that can erupt. You can plant a coffee tree and it takes around 3-5 years for them to work but then they die after 20-25 years and they become useless after that. Coffee is better when it is grown naturally rather than in stores because it’s more natural and tastes better. I feel like you can taste the difference between natural coffee and the coffee you buy at the store, but that doesn’t really matter to me because either way, if you drink coffee like me by putting a lot of cream and sugar, you can hardly tell the difference. Since Costa Rica has gotten very popular over these past few years because of their coffee it was really important to understand why and how they’ve gotten so popular.