The coffee tour that was actually worth it

I spent a lot of Costa Rica feeling mildly fleeced. The coffee tour is the one I would pay for again without
thinking about it.

Part of that is the setting. Coffee here grows on the slopes around the Central Valley, in rows that follow the
contours of some genuinely absurd gradients, and simply walking those rows is worth the morning. The cherries are the
surprise: coffee arrives as a hard dark bean, and on the bush it is a bright red fruit, glossy, in clusters, closer to
a cranberry than to anything you would recognise in a cup. Nobody tells you that. Seeing it rearranges the whole
substance in your head.

The rest is that the tour has something to explain. You follow the thing from bush to cup – picking, pulping, drying,
sorting, roasting – and each of those steps turns out to be a decision that changes what you end up drinking. That is
a real body of knowledge, delivered by people who work with it, and it is the opposite of the experiences that
disappointed me elsewhere on this trip, which were mostly a walk somewhere pretty with a price on it.

The tasting at the end is the part I expected to be theatre and was not. Having just watched where the differences
come from, you can actually taste them, which is not something I could honestly claim beforehand.

If you are being ruthless about a Costa Rica itinerary and cutting the things that trade on reputation, keep this one.
It is cheap by the standards of what else you will be sold here, it is genuinely informative, and it is about the
single thing this country is unarguably world-class at.