Panama Origin Trip 01-16-11
We a
rrived Panama City Sunday night – just in time to get to hotel and try to grab a drink paired with a small bite of local fare. What we got was a bad glass of ‘merlot’ (which I opted out of…life is too short) and a beef dish that we spent the rest of the meal trying to figure out: ‘is it pork, is it processed – my take was that it was jerky…in the slim jim family.
Panama City is a gateway city – full of commerce and new business opportunity. Since the ‘take back’ of the Panama Canal in 1999 the city has experienced transformation into new possibility and growth. That may sound more romantic that it should – but you can see the country influx of new all around you.
Today I prep for the trip to Boquete tomorrow. We fly from Panama City to David early tomorrow morning and take a 45 minute car ride to our hotel in Boquete. This area of Panama is referred to as the Western Highlands and is a perfect hot bed for some of the finest highland coffees in the world.
Some of the coffees in Boquete are shade grown, a more traditional method where the plant grows in the shade of a forest or among trees planted for this purpose. Trees provide habitat to hundreds of bird species – many being migratory birds. Bird watching is a treasured pastime here. The other advantages are that trees preserve the chemical balance of the soil, prevent erosion and produce a natural mulch which can act as a fertilizer. It’s also believed to help protect the crop from pests requiring less pesticide – always a plus. Those that aren’t shade grown are usually that way because of the needed sunlight, how much cloud cover they experience and where the coffee is grown in relation to the mountains and when sunlight hits them.
Coffees here are normally harvested by hand from October to February. A large part of the workforce are migrant Ngobe-Bugle farm workers who are critical to the coffee industry in Panama. The harvesting is done by hand to enable fully formed, ripe red fruit to be pulled from the tree rather than under ripe/immature green that might get pulled as well in mechanical harvesting. Once dried (most are sun dried, a process that takes 8-12 days) the beans are stored for approximately 3 months for a curing (aging) of sorts. This coffee is ready to sell in late March or early April. Obviously, this isn’t an perfect opportunity to taste test new coffees as most are ‘resting’ – but our opportunity came now and seeing the promise of new crop on the tree is a rare treat.
Coffee is on!
Piper
