The Coffee Process

One of my favorite experiences as a part of my internship has been carrying out the entire process of picking, de-pulping, threshing, drying, roasting, and drinking delicious coffee. The whole process takes places onsite at La Biosfera.

This is the Caturra variety of coffee. The other variety planted is Catuai, whose fruit is yellow when ripe. Both varieties from the species C. arabica, the species generally regarded to have to most robust flavor.

The coffee fruit turns a bright red when ripe, and at that point it is picked and soaked in a bucked before being depulped.

Obviously this is usually done on a much larger scale, but since we only have about 30 coffee plants, we use what very well may be the smallest coffee de-pulper on the planet.

After being de-pulped, the beans are allowed to dry out in the sun for a few days.

Once dry, the beans need to be threshed to get rid of the hard shell. This is done very easily by machine, but we wanted to do the whole process artisanally, so I filled a pillow case with the dried beans and whacked it against the floor a few times and ended up with pretty thoroughly threshed beans. 

This is what the beans look like once they have been threshed. Now, its ready to be roasted.

This type of clay dish is what was used to roast coffee before machinery ever existed. The smell of fresh coffee grew stronger and stronger as we roasted them over a bed of coals. 

The final product. Earthy and not too acidic. Yum.

La Biosfera in a Nutshell

Well, my internship here is wrapping up -- I'm done on Saturday. We've gotten a lot done to improve on the existing permaculture models, add some new ones, completely renovate the water system, and ramp up La Biosfera's publicity. I'm realizing that I still haven't published any pictures of the place itself, so here are some photos of the recycling/permaculture initiatives (specifically for families with very few resources) we have going on:

Bunk beds made out of recycled truck tires. Very, Very comfortable. The wood came from a zapatillo tree that had already fallen on the property.

The posada where guests sleep (and where all the tire trunk bunks are)  was made using earthbag construction -- bags filled with dirt and then stacked like bricks.

This is one of the three gardens on site, this one recently expanded. We've just started planting and some plants are already poking out of the soil.

We still haven't perfected the system, but we're working on  heating our water with compost. It has worked a few times, but not totally consistent.

Compost toilets. Today an unsustainable level water is wasted in human waste management. The recycling of humanure is going to be essential for sustainability. It's not as gross as it sounds -- it doesn't smell and it's placed well out of sight, and it's really easy to do. Most importantly, it's a very effective fertilizer.

Another great building option for people with few resources. We haven't built a full-scale version yet, but this is the doghouse that we use to show how it works. You put all your non-organic trash inside of plastic bottles and they make a very useful building tool. 

Mobile chicken coop. The chickens tear up the dirt, eat the bugs, and fertilize the soil in areas where you are planning to plant a garden. 

Water swale. In one of my previous posts I put up a video explaining how a swale works. Well, here's ours.  I spent most of last week tearing up old cement and resealing it. 

This is the latest addition and in my opinion the best example of a self-incentivizing recycling initiative. A plastic bottle filled with water retracts light at 360 degrees. Very simple to install and provides 50 watts of light. 

So there you have it. La Biosfera in a nutshell. In my next post I'll talk about the coffee we grow, pick, depulp, thresh, toast, and (of course) drink all on site.

Top Gap Year Blog

Little update on the blog -- Go!Overseas, a travel site that provides users with information for meaningful abroad experiences, has listed my blog on their "Top Gap Year Blogs" list. Wohoo! Pretty exciting. Click on their logo to the right of this post and check out their website -- they`ve got some pretty neat stuff.

Gallo Pinto... It's what's for dinner (and breakfast and lunch)

Eating lunch today, I realized that it was my 12th straight meal of Gallo Pinto. Yup, that means breakfast, lunch, and dinner for four days straight. I felt that deserved a blog post. The strange thing is, I'm really not that tired of it. I mean come on, many Nicaraguans have been eating Gallo Pinto for every meal for their entire life, so I feel like I'm in no position to complain.

The name, Gallo Pinto, literally means "spotted rooster." How it got that name is unclear, but it has made it's way into being the national dish of both Nicaragua and Costa Rica. Some say that it got its name because the rice, after being cooked with the beans, kind of looks like a white rooster with red spots. That explanation is a bit boring, so I'm going with the one that I learned the other day: a guy named Juan had a huge spotted rooster (gallo pinto) that he was very proud of. He went around the entire neighborhood bragging about how big his gallo pinto was and invited everyone in the barrio to come to a party that weekend because he planned to kill and eat it and wanted to share with everyone. On the night of the party, the whole neighborhood came to Juan's house to eat the gallo pinto. Now, this was a really, really big spotted rooster, but it certainly was not big enough to feed an entire barrio. So Juan, in a panic and not wanting anyone to leave hungry, threw together all the rice and all the beans he had into a huge frying pan and cooked it with oil until the rice started turning red. Needless to say, the neighborhood people were not very happy to be eating rice and beans when they had been promised a big gallo pinto. Everyone left in a bad mood, and Juan soon became the laughing stock of the neighborhood. For weeks after that night, people passing his house in the street would sarcastically shout out, "Hey, Juan, that gallo pinto you gave us last night was delicious!" The name, apparently, stuck and people have been calling rice and beans cooked in that manner "Gallo Pinto" ever since.

The stuff is really not that bad. Once described as "the perfect combination of carbs and protein," it is almost revered in Nicaraguan culture, where people never seem to get tired of eating it. A Nicaraguan friend of mine once explained, "Sometimes we eat rice and beans; sometimes we eat beans and rice; but on special occasions -- we eat Gallo Pinto."

Checking In

My posts are becoming pretty sparse, I know. My internet situation has been... well, unreliable. We had internet installed for a while but it hasn't been working lately.

My internship is going well -- we are currently working on a petition to distribute water from the property to the surrounding community, which has no access to clean water. I'll update again in a few days with some pictures of the place where I've been staying for the past little more than a month.

Stay Classy.

Jinotega (finally posting something)

Okay folks its been a while since my last post, but better late than never I guess. I've been in Jinotega, Nicaragua for about two weeks now. I'm staying on a permaculture farm outside of town called "La Biosfera." I started out doing random little projects here and there in exchange for lodging, but I've now been moved into an official internship position and will be working on a few long-term projects over the next few months, so I'm really excited about that. This permaculture farm is an upshoot of a failed water bottling business that Suzanne, the owner of the Biosfera, started in order to have revenue for an alternative ecomomic development plan that she was planning to implement. Unfortunately the spring water had some bacteria in it and she closed doors on the business and decided to focus on permaculture. A couple of years ago she built an earthbag guest dorm hoping to get some cash flow from the increasing number of eco-tourists that are traveling around Central America. What exactly is permaculature? Here's a quick vid that explains much better than I can.



So basically permaculture is the attempt to ensure that the human race will stay on this planet for a long, long time without outstripping resources. Cool stuff. One thing that's important to note - contrary to what you might have gathered from the video, not all permaculturists are hippies. Suzanne is a retired Marine, so I think that pretty much makes her not a hippie.

Some of the concepts we have going are humanure recycling, earthbag construction, and swale water harvesting. I haven't really taken any pictures of this stuff yet, but here's a short little video about water swales:



My posts might be kind of few and far between while I'm here, because unless we get Internet at the Biosfera I have to come into town to use it. I'll still try to post once a week.

I'm glad I've finally found a non-gringo-infested place where I can see myself spending an extended period of time. It's nice to be so far off the beaten track that not many tourists make it out here, and those that do are people looking for a more authentic Nicaraguan experience -- the kind of people that I actually like to spend time with.

I did manage to get a few pictures of the sun setting the other day. As you can see, this place is absolutely gorgeous.

So that's that. I'll post again no later than next Sunday.

Another change in plans

I know I said I was flying into Managua on the 4th, but, well, I'm still in Nashville. I have a bunch of stuff to sort out before going back and my plans still need a bit more... solidifying. Details to come.