Scouting Panama - Day 15 - Boquete Coffee Finca
Today we visited a coffee farm (Spanish = finca) near Boquete, at an elevation of over 6000 feet. Every hillside was planted with coffee plants and trees to shade them. We learned the twist-to-pick method used to harvest the beans and saw different types of coffee plants, including the Geisha coffee that currently sells for over $1200 per pound.
Panama grows boutique coffees like Geisha, and it is unusual for buyers like Starbucks to come here, because the fincas/plantations are smaller, and the volume is comparatively low. Because much of Panamanian coffee is sold within Panama, most of the fincas also roast their own beans, and you can see the smoke from the roaster in the second photo. The tour guides also reminded us that the lighter the roast, the stronger the caffeine - the stronger tasting roasts are not the caffeine effect that people expect! There was a coffee shop near the roasting ovens, and they also offered excellent cakes. The Geisha coffee is brewed more like tea, and has a light taste; it is sold mostly to the Japanese where the tea-like coffee brewing is an art.
Tonight was the farewell dinner for the tour, and we went to a restaurant set by the river with a fire pit and a dance floor right next to the river. We ate well, and a local band played hits from the 1960s and ‘70s, so I knew all of the words, and I chair danced while we ate. For dessert, we were given giant marshmallows on sticks to take down to the fire pit and roast to our taste - boy, that fire was hot!
We stopped at a waterfall on our way to the coffee plantation, so I took a photo of Miguel’s pretty smile as the water descended behind him.
Tomorrow, we move to a different and smaller hotel right downtown near the Town Plaza. That will put us within a block of a gym, and close to the smaller restaurants and shops that were not included in the tour. Boquete has 80 restaurants for a town of 15,000, and is the district seat for a district of only 30,000!
Talk to you tomorrow, and we wish you a buenas noches from Panama!
MaryBea y Miguel