We move to a dim warehouse, walking through the maze of machinery that shakes with ear-numbing racket as it sorts through billions of dried coffee beans. Spencer explains how the beans are jostled across the flat metal surface and eventually sort themselves. Like waves in the ocean, they’re organized by size as they march forward. (And just like that, the women that once sat in the heat of the day and patiently hand-sorted beans are replaced with this noisy effectiveness.)

Outside, the machine spits out a massive pile of husks and bad beans. It will become fire fuel or garden compost. Nothing is wasted. Not even coffee bean waste. Massive bags of beans are loaded onto trucks and shipped out, back down the highway to Managua. This happens all before it’s ever roasted or ground, or poured into a cup. And we’ve not even seen the farming.

We climb into the truck exhausted, passing around a bottle of cool water we nabbed from the office cooler. I watch the women walk back from lunch and into the heat, across the massive yard. The men lug bags on bent shoulders. How much effort is put into my food. And paying a little extra for a cup, knowing it would come from here, it would go to the hard-working people I’ve met today, seems completely inconsequential.

The scale is grand. It’s much larger than anything Spencer’s seen in his Latin America coffee tours. But even trying to picture something smaller, one woman raking coffee, one man lugging bags, it’s mind blowing how much work is put into it (even something as simple as coffee), how much my thankfulness is limited to the barista before me, and how I’ve pretty much taken for granted everything else behind coffee. I promise myself to do a better job when I get home. I promise to stop taking the absolute luxury of my morning coffee for granted. To pause for at least a moment, to remember the people and places that contribute to each cup.