The taste of coffee depends on many secrets ... Los Tarrales invites you to discover some of them during a coffee tour. Coffee dried under the sun has to be moved several times a day.   Birding in shade coffee plantation along the Rinconada trail. |
A third of the world population drinks coffee. There are hundreds of different recipes for preparing it. The world's coffee drinkers consume 4,500,000 tons of green coffee beans each year. Guatemala is known to produce some of the world's finest coffees. Los Tarrales produces highland Arabic coffee (Coffea arabica), which is the most aromatic among the three species which are economically important. On a guided coffee tour (approximateley 45 min) in Los Tarrales you can see all the steps to produce green coffee beans.
For one pound of coffee beans, 2.5 kilograms of coffee cherries need to be plucked. After picking, seven working steps need to be passed to get the coffee beans ready for exportation. In Los Tarrales the coffee is processed to its highest level, the green coffee bean - in Guatemala called ‘oro’ - ‘gold’. The best time for a guided coffee tour in Los Tarrales is November, the main harvest season. But whenever you come to visit us you will see some fruit on the coffee trees. In March occurs the main blooming, which fills the air with its sweet fragrance.
All of the Los Tarrales coffee is shade grown. This type of coffee cultivation offers habitat to many bird species, including many migratory birds from North America. Skilled birders can observe more than 100 species in one morning.
We re-use the organic garbage which accumulates during the process of coffee production. We run a earthworm composting of the pulps, the compost ground we use in our cultivations of ornamental plants.
