El Trapiche Tour — Attraction in Monteverde

We expected this tour to be enjoyable and informative, and it delivered beyond our hopes. So much fun! So well done! We had a fantastic time, learned so much about some of our favorite foods, and enjoyed every minute! It was a highlight of our stay in. Monteverde. First and foremost this is a family-run enterprise, and that pride and intimacy run through everything. Diego who showed us round is the owners’ son and his passion and knowledge are a delight. It’s a beautiful location to tour, with sweeping views and verdant coffee plantings, and we saw close up the traditional production of all three crops. We even got to make our own sugar-molasses candy! Much thought and care has gone into presenting this tour. Buildings are decorated with fun murals featuring indigenous farmers and historic scenes. The details of how these treasured tastes get from the field to our cup are well explained and fascinating. We were encouraged to smell and taste all the way through, finishing with a final delicious tasting of coffee and a savory specialty dish grown in their garden and cooked for us by Diego’s mom. Anyone who likes coffee and chocolate will be entertained, educated and delighted by this experience. Oh, and the gift shop offered their delicious products at very fair prices - we have been drinking the superior Trapiche coffee ever since we left and I am only sorry we didn’t buy way more than the five bags we...

Fun, educational, and pleasant, this is how I rate the tour at El Trapache. We wanted to go on a tour and get familiar with how the local farmers grow, harvest, and roast their coffee produce. Costa Rica exports only 1% of the world's coffee supply, but the weather conditions and the soil make Costa Rica one of the best quality coffee bean producers. It turns out that there are farms in Monteverde that produce some of the highest quality beans.  We visited El Trapache Tour, and we were delighted to meet with our guide, Jairo. He was very knowledgeable and entertaining. He showed us the coffee fields located on the land's hills, the sugar cane plantation, and the cacao trees. Jairo explained that the coffee plants prefer a bit cooler climate instead of constantly hot weather, making Monteverde the ideal place to grow coffee plants.  We made our own Dolce de Cana, and upon our return home in NYC, I still use the sugar candy to sweeten my coffee.  If you go, get some of their Anaerobic coffee. Those are Arabica beans fermented without oxygen, which allows for the sugars in the coffee's mucilage to convert into a different type of acid, ethyl alcohol, and other compounds. The flavor is amazing. I got 10lbs of coffee for our household, but I am going back for more once I run out. Too bad their coffee is not exported outside of...

I would highly recommend this tour! We tried going to the last tour at 3pm the prior day, but was told it was full when calling at around 2pm. So we made a reservation that night for the next day at 1pm. Upon arrival at around noon, we paid and sat around to wait until the tour which started promptly at 1pm. We were blessed to have Diego as our tour guide, who happens to be the owner. When he said his brother and his dad are in the back working on the sugarcane and his mom was in the kitchen, I thought he was joking until when I found out that he was not. The entire tour allowed us to know more about cocoa, coffee, sugarcane, and other plants around the farm. He was super informative and humorous. We got to try a bit of everything, from tasting raw coffee and cacao, to roasted cacao, to chocolate in liquid form, to making candy out of sugarcane. We thoroughly enjoyed the tour and ended up getting some coffee as souvenirs. Though they were not cheap, they were the cheapest and freshest from the tour site. We later saw few grocery stores that sold them, but they were roasted with earlier dates and were more expensive. The brand is not as well known and we could not find any in La Fortuna, which makes the souvenirs the...