Don’t you just love how I’m dragging out these honeymoon posts? 
I’m still trying to find a “blogging schedule” that works for me right now. Life is busy (who’s isn’t?) and I’d rather be living life than writing about it!
Anyways, onto another honeymoon post!
Chocolate and coffee…two loves of my life (besides Ryan, of course!). As soon as we saw the billboard for a chocolate and coffee tour we knew we would fit it in somewhere in our schedule. I mean, how can you go to Costa Rica and not do a coffee tour?!
Our tour guide, Hairo (pronounced hi-roh), was hilarious. He knew English very well and even referenced jokes and slang I would only expect an American to know. You could tell he absolutely loved his job, which made me appreciate the tour even more.
He picked on people from the group at every stop to be his helper’s…I was the first . This is where he was explaining everything that goes into growing a coffee bean, which is downright crazy. It definitely made me appreciate all of the effort and work that goes into having coffee so easily here.
Coffee plants!
Coffee beans. All of the coffee beans on this plantation are handpicked. Yes, every last bean is HANDPICKED. How insane is that?!
After the coffee plants, we moved on to see more of the process of how a coffee bean becomes a coffee bean like we know it. There’s all sorts of machines and drying and time that needs to pass before a coffee bean is ready to be made into a fresh cup of joe.
Coffee bean, before it has dried. Someone ate one of these…I would not advise that.
All of the coffee beans drying in a greenhouse. Hello, humidity!
Cacao beans…aka future chocolate. Mmm.
This is a container that sorts out all of the good beans from the bad ones.
Next up was trying different chocolates…aka my favorite part.
I’m typically not a fan of white chocolate but this was different. It tasted more …real if that makes sense.
Mmm, chooocolate.
And my favorite, chocolate covered coffee beans! We ended up buying a package of these to take home, which we shockingly still have a few left.
Sugar cane was next on our stop. Holy. Cow. Juice straight from actual stalks of sugar cane is ri-di-culous.
Here are two members of our group pushing the sugar cane stalk back and forth thru this “juicer” to extract the juice. They have tails on because donkeys used to be a part of this process, hehe.
Sluuuurp. He added a bit of lime juice to the cane juice and ohmygosh it was so good.
And then we met Don Juan, the owner of the plantation, himself!
We ended the tour with a fresh cup of coffee and rice pudding (random, but still delicious). This was one of my favorite tours for sure!
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Chocolate + coffee = my heaven!
Agreed!
What a fun tour! I love tours, so this would be right up my alley!
Definitely one of my favs!
Great photos! It looks like a great tour! We are still planning our honeymoon and are definitely going to choose somewhere warm and beautiful like Costa Rica!
I could not recommend Costa Rica enough. Everything was great! Let me know if you have questions about traveling there if you decide CR!
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