La Finca

Instead of starting the day with a nice cup of coffee, we decided to spend the whole day in it. Guatemala's climate, high altitude, fertile volcanic soil and traditional farming practices have contributed to its worldwide recognition for growing the highest quality coffee. It seemed only fitting that we take a tour of a local finca, or coffee plantation.

There are supposedly over 60,000 fincas in the country, offering a wide variety of coffees. The region of Antigua is one of the more fertile areas for the crop, and served as the perfect location for our tour.
We were picked up in downtown Antigua and tightly packed into what appeared to be an open sided army truck. Careening through the rough cobblestone streets of the city, the vehicle never missed a protruding rock or a weathered pothole. We were bounced and tossed around like coffee beans in the shelling tumbler, which we would soon be seeing.

The 142 year old Filadelfia farm has remained in the same family for four generations and is considered a medium sized coffee plantation. The farm spreads throughout a valley which is surrounded on three sides by mountains. Small villages and homes dot the ridges and high slopes above the plantation, and many of the workers live on the mountains.

Filadelfia coffee plantation

The coffee plants are basically overgrown bushes, or at most they seem like scraggly looking trees. Our tour began at the nursery. Each tree is a product of grafting an Arabica coffee plant onto the root system of a different, more robust type of coffee plant. On a good day, a single female worker can graft over 1000 saplings. The young trees stay in the nursery for at least a year before they replace older trees in the fields which have reached the end of their 24 year bean producing lifespan.

Coffee nursery

The bean harvest runs for about four months during the winter, and each plant is visited numerous times throughout the harvest season. The beans are hand picked one at a time by local workers, most of whom return each year. The beans are immediately sacked and weighed before beginning the long process of being washed, hulled, dried and bagged for market. On the day of our tour the beans were all being shipped to Japan, but the receiving companies and world destinations can vary greatly. Although the majority of the beans are shipped abroad to other coffee companies, a percentage of them are roasted on the plantation and ground into packets of coffee which can be purchased around the world under the brand R. Dalton.

The tour concluded where we began, with a nice cup of coffee.

Coffee beans are ready to be picked when they turn bright red

Coffee spread out during the drying process