Coffee

When I was a little kid, one of my favorite things was seeing my grandpa's pickup coming down our drive way.  My grandpa is a great story teller.  Whenever we saw him coming as kids, we knew what to do: get him his coffee.  Was it morning, evening, half past midnight?  Didn't matter--Norwegians drink coffee any time of day.  That being said, there is only one thing that could cause this face:

 A coffee tour!  That's right friends, as soon as we woke up our first morning in Monte Verde, Sam knew he had to take me to the coffee tour as quickly as possible.  Off to Don Juan's!

This is a picture of the coffee plantation:

And here are some close ups of those beans that make me so happy.  Sam is taking one home to see if we can have a decorative coffee plant.  Our guide said we may be able to pull it off.

You only want to make coffee from the dark red beans

Hello, gorgeous!

We had such a great guide on this trip.  She was almost as passionate about coffee as me.  She said that we needed to leave the tour as teachers about coffee.  Little did she know, I've been spreading the word for as long as I can remember.  As if all that coffee wasn't great enough, we also got some more knowledge about chocolate.  Could it get any better?  Unlike on our other chocolate tour, this time we got to see cacao pods and try the seeds.  They were really sweet.

In Costa Rica, coffee growing has been a part of their culture for almost two hundred years.  This is what a traditional Costa Rica coffee cart looks like:

And as an extra bonus, here is more of my coffee heaven:

This is Sam with a gigantic coffee grinder and the room of coffee.  I think we need a room of coffee in our house.
 
The tour ended with an all you could drink coffee tasting. While we were discussing which roast was our favorite, we got to meet Don Juan himself.  He looked great for his age.  My grandpa would say it was all the coffee.