Okay ... on to a tour of the Esperanza mill in Esteli, close to Matagalpa. This is a very new mill that prepares coffee for many small farms and cooperatives. It is not a cooperative mill though, it is owned by the Mejia Brothers. Esperanza is a dry mill, meaning that the coffee comes here in parchment (the seed contained in the outer parchment shell, called pergamino). At a dry mill, the coffee is hulled out of the parchment, cleaned, screened for size, sorted by density, machine-sorted for color, then hand-sorted to remove any defects, brokens, etc. Here you see an overview of the hand-sorting lines, with the finished bags of coffee piled and ready for export. At this point (March to May) the mill is in peak production.