La Amistad’s Coffee Tour

La Amistad’s coffee tour allows you to participate in the harvesting and processing of our estate-grown organic coffee. You can pick coffee berries, then watch them being processed in our traditional beneficio along with carefully selected berries from our neighbors. Here, you can see the combination of organic agriculture, shade-grown coffee, an environment that promotes migratory and resident birds and the highest quality, environmentally-sound coffee processing. And, because we insist on high quality and only organic practices, no other project allows its neighbors to earn so much with their coffee.

The estate is planted with the fine caturra and catuai varieties of Arabica coffee under nitrogen-fixing flame trees. These trees enrich the soil with nitrogen and shade the coffee. Their beautiful red-orange flowers feed large numbers of hummingbirds, while their fruits feed dozens of other species of birds. The leaves provide fertilizer for the coffee and the roots maintain the soil.

Between the coffee plants, the ground is covered with many other kinds of plants, pruned by hand and trimmed by sheep. This ground cover ensures that the soil is soft, aerated, and protected from erosion. Insects and earthworms also aerate the soil. The soil is enriched with organic fertilizer made from coffee pulp from the previous year’s crop mixed with ashes from the drying kilns, sawdust and chicken manure, and then processed by earthworms.