Cafe Libre

Today we went to yet another coffee farm. This one, however, was more of a tourism locale than an actual coffee plantation. It was very developed... too developed in fact. Sidewalks took you around to see the plants, and the entire tour was actually a rehearsed performance by the three tour guides. In fact, they actually gave a performance in a theater which was behind the gift shop and restaurant (which had delicious food). This theater was big too. There were about 40 people in the tour group... and we probably filled 20 percent of the theater. They legitimately put on a show too... props, costume changes, obvious scripts with bad jokes, video during costume changes (which required another worker to run the video and slide shows which were ever present). It honestly got annoying after a while... which is when I figured out what the main difference between the two coffee plantations we visited was. First, let me explain more about today´s plantation, Cafe Britt. Cafe Britt (or at least the Cafe Britt plantation we visited today) grows organic coffee. Organic meaning they use no chemicals to harm the environment, or as little as possible, in the production of their coffee. This is the first difference between the two farms, being that the other plantation is not organic. The benefit of being an organic farm is that people who are environmentally aware will typically buy products with an ¨organic¨ label somewhere on it. The downfalls are the further increased costs as compared to the increased profits (as discussed in the previous coffee post). However, I think these two farms are somewhat the same, only because I´m willing to bet some money that Cafe Britt has other plantations at other locations which are not organic... at all. All of this leads me to my conclusion on the primary difference between these two coffee places, which I´ll assume you, the bored ass reading my post, has probably figured out:
Del Cafe Tal was a coffee farm with the sole intention on making coffee, while Cafe Britt (once again the branch of Cafe Britt we were at today) is solely based on tourism. It is obvious that they have probably spent at least, and I emphasize at least, 3 or 4 times as much money on tourist capital at that farm compared to their coffee producing capital. We saw one building solely devoted to making coffee, and for an operation of their apparent size, it was not brewing much coffee to justify how large their organization is. Also, I hardly saw many coffee fields, probably due to all the tourism buildings blocking my view. So I may be mistaken. There were several buildings we didn´t enter... which easily could be for coffee, but I don´t think they´re very relevant to the main coffee production process. Now recall how I mentioned that the food was good at their restaurant (which was large) which was attached via a circular coffee bar to the gift shop with everything from actual coffee to Costa Rica t-shirts and stuffed animals. Now, one of the main reasons for my belief that Cafe Britt´s plantation was really a tourist attraction moreso than a coffee producer.
Do the math for yourself. Forty people (29 of us, including professors), each of whom paid probably between 30 and 50 dollars for this cheesy, but informative, tour. For math´s sake we´ll take the mean of $40. Next, I was leading the group when we were moving from the theater to the gift shop, when I noticed an entire center shelf set devoted to large bags of their five dollar coffee bags. When we were leaving the gift shop to eat, I noticed that probably one third of what had to have been approximately 600 bags of coffee remained. Now lets throw in another 500 dollars in sales for the people who bought bags and had them delivered home (not off the shelf), and we´ll throw in a modest $100 for random souveniers bought by stupid people willing to get ripped off. Doing quick math, our grand total in sales for our tour alone reached upwards of $4200 American dollars. Pretty good in Costa Rica for a couple of hours of work.

In conclusion to this monstrosity of a post, I enjoyed our trip to the smaller, family owned Del Cafe Tal far more than the trip to the commercial tourism site known as Cafe Britt. It was much more laid back, and more importantly for me, natural. I loved the hiking about a mile to get to the main house (Daisy´s, the owner´s, home) up and down the mountain on a dirt road. All around us was vegetation unlike any I´ll ever see in brutal Ohio. I can´t say that I could write a post solely about Del Cafe Tal and also tag it as a tourism post, but I think I have justified the tourism tag with my analysis of how their methods proceeded and tricked stupid tourists, like me, into buying a bunch of shit that we don´t really want or need. That was an unreal sentence (give me props... a four line long sentence that´s not a run on? I´m awesome). Anyhow, no one will probably read all the way down here and probably shouldn´t unless su nombre es Saul Adelman o Glenn Platt. Muchas gracias, y que los ticos aqui dice, pura vida.

Burf