Coffee: El Salvador's third largest export

machine for washing the husks off the coffee beans

areas for washing beans and the drying patios are in the background

drums to do final drying of the beans for the perfect humidity

Storage area with hundreds of bags of coffee beans sorted and labeled for export.

These ladies sort the beans in the final processes.

See the man at the end of the room carrying a bag of beans.

Roasting area for Central American sales, Starbucks roasts their own beans.

We traveled with Carol and Guyof S/V Stray Cat to the mountains west of Costa del Sol seeing more of this beautiful country. The Ruta de Flores winds through the Apaneca - Ilamatepec mountains covered with coffee fields. At the higher elevations the bushes were covered with small white blossoms and beans at the lower elevations. El Carmen is a coffee processing plant that sells their product worldwide with 40% to Starbucks, 40% to an Italian company and the rest is roasted for sale in Central America. The process is more extensive than we had expected. Our guide was very proud of the fact they grow very high quality beans for export. Great emphasis is given to maintain the identity of each lot from the time its coffee cherries are harvested until the green beans are ready for export. The cherries are hand picked at the optimum ripeness, then naturally fermented, washed with pure spring water, sun-dried on clay patios, then left to ‘rest’ for a minimum of 60 days under ideal conditions to reach uniform humidity and color. Coffee beans have 2 husks on them that are removed early in the process and the final step is sorting and grading the beans by size, which is done by several women at a conveyor belt.