A Visit to Turones!

We're off again with our friends Maryse and Guy and their visiting sister-in-law, Christian, to check out a Resort as well as a coffee finca.

Turrones is about 45 minutes from us and near to Ateneas, Costa Rica and as Maryse and Guy had been there before, they wanted to share it with us.  Turones is a Coffee Finca and a Resort where you can visit for the day or longer.  There are cabins available for rent, which we viewed, and they are quite cozy and well equipped.  There are two separate, large swimming pools with long fun looking slides and a hot tub.  Unfortunately, it was a bit chilly for us to swim but they are quite busy at this time of year, as school is out in December and January (Costa Rica's summer vacation) and many people also take their vacation.  As you can see, there are also a number of places to have a picnic.

The slides are quite long and beautifully landscaped as are the grounds of the Resort.

Here is a covered sitting area with a spectacular view of Alajuela and Gracia.  We enjoyed our lunch and a nice glass of wine sitting here.

This is a view from the top of the slide that runs down to the second pool.

Not interested in packing a lunch!  There is also a restaurant with a bar!  We had lunch there and everything was delicious.

When we arrived we were greeted by lots of coffee drying in the parking lot on black landscape plastic.

It was late in the afternoon and our tour couldn't start until the coffee was taken care of for the night.  We all pitched in to scoop the coffee into sacks and the job went quickly.

Look at us work!!

Just a little bit more.  Evon, in the yellow shirt, is the owner and here Don and Christian are watching as Guy looks on.

Once the coffee was taken care of we went off to see how this company processes our coffee. Don & I are very familiar with what happens to coffee before it gets to this point and were interested to see how other coffee growers process their coffee once it has been picked.  Our coffee is taken to a receividor that belongs to the Palmares Coop and they remove the skins, dry and package our coffee.At Turones they have their own machine which removes the skins of the coffee, shown in the photo, and they they dry it as we showed above and also on large tables.

Here Don and Christian are looking at the waste that is made from removing the skins from the beans of the coffee.

A look at how the processing machine works!

The machine separates the coffee beans from the skins and also grades the beans by size.

Evon is showing Don and Maryse what happens once the beans and skins are separated. After the beans have gone through the processor they are spread out on landscape screen about waist high above the ground to dry in the sun.

Each evening the beans are covered with a plastic cover to protect them from any moisture occurring overnight.  Turones bags their own coffee and sells it in the U.S. and other countries.

After a fun day at Turones we returned to Guy and Maryse's, snapped a quick photo--Guy, Maryse, Christian and Don. :)  Guess who is taking the photo!