We’re going on a coffee hunt!

“I do find the world of business fascinating,” says Peter as I try, somewhat confused, to explain why I am going all the way up to North Berwick, not far from Edinburgh, to buy Nicaraguan coffee, which actually came from Pumphreys in Newcastle in the first place.

I am too small, or at least, Doctor Coffee’s Cafe is too small. The cooperative in Nicaragua cannot sell me coffee directly, because it is simply not worth their while to export such small quantities. Instead, I tried Pumphreys, who do get Nicaraguan coffee – from Cecocafen -in stock. But again, Pumphreys do not sell enough pure Nicaraguan to make it worth roasting and retailing themselves. They sell huge sacks of green Matagalpan coffee to Howdah’s Tea and Coffee Company in North Berwick, who roast it to order, and will then sell it on to me, back in Darlington. This is just one example of why my Theory of Commodity Fishnets gets so complicated.

It is also an example of how so many attempts at ‘ethical’ trading are thwarted in this industry. I tried! I really tried! I am writing a paper at the moment for the ‘AcKnowledging Ethical Economies’ section of the Royal Geographical Society conference, and mine concentrates on the idea of Direct Trade. In simple terms, this just means coffee retailers are actually visiting the plantations and buying directly from the farmers, or at least, the cooperatives, and then roasting it themselves, straight to their customers. In academic terms, this serves to strengthen and shorten the links in the commodity ‘chain’, shares knowledge of coffee between producer and consumer and thus, theoretically makes trading somewhat more equal, and allows consumers to ‘engage’ more with what they are buying. There are of course, some flaws to this arrangement: namely, my issues with how much control and influence the buyers have. I don’t think this Knowledge is actually shared that equally, and we’re back to the subjective cupping-as-quality-control problem. But that is a whole other paper.

In economic terms, which for Doctor Coffee is more important, Direct Trade cuts out the middlemen. The less people there are in the chain, the less the money has to be shared. This can mean coffee is a bit cheaper for me, but also that the farmers actually get a bigger proportion of the price. I have managed this with my Costa Rican coffee. Cafe Cristina grow, process and roast the coffee and ship it to me, and I turn it into drinks in my Ape. Simples! But with the Nicaraguan stuff, this simplicity has so far eluded me. Instead, I have to pay the farmers, the Solcafe workers who process it, the importers and the roasters, and chase it around the country before I can actually use it to sell cappuccinos to the Darlington masses.

I would love to be able to tell you that this is why your average coffee is so expensive. But it isn’t the reason. A £2.25 cappuccino from Caffe Nero also includes the cost of the milk, cup, baristas’ wages, rent, electricity, tax, branding, insurance….I have plenty of overheads with Doctor Coffee’s as well, so I am not going to say exactly how much the Nicaraguan coffee works out as. Suffice to say though, the proportion of the price that actually makes its way back to the farmers in Matagalpa is depressingly small. And there seems to be very little I can do about it!

North Berwick

Matagalpa

World Barista Championships

Woo… it all happened. This year, in Atlanta.

INTRODUCING THE WORLD BARISTA CHAMPION OF 2009…

And he’s the British guy! Gwilym Davies. Yay!! Finally, we win something.
Actually, we seem to do very well at the competitive art form that is making coffee. 2008’s winner was Irish, and 2007’s was British as well.  Strange that a source of national pride (at least, in certain circles) comes from coffee? Maybe we no longer cling to our teapots as much as everyone thought.

Gwilym Davies was apparently using a 50% Costa Rican blend of coffee anyway. I am debating whether to look up to see how the Costa Rican entrant did. I saw the national finals in San Jose while I was there, and it was won by a girl called Auren Hortensia Chacon Leiva. I remember thinking at the time it was pretty obvious she was going to win from the start – she was very, very good. But unfortunately not world class.

I am still finding it very hard to associate events like the Barista championships with the conditions on the coffee farms. This is not one joined up industry, by a long way.

Panamanian Rage Against The Machine

(ok so there is only a passing reference to Panama in this, but I love the word ‘Panamanian’. Surely ‘Panamania’ should be a technical term for ‘overenthusiam about everything’?)

All in neat rows, too!

This week I visited Doka Estate, another massive coffee plantation, this time on the edge of Volcan Poas, outside Alajuela, Costa Rica. The journey up there took nearly 3 hours, and involved 3 different buses and a 2km hike, each way. But worth it – just getting out of San Jose lifted my mood incredibly, and more importantly, the bus rides took me up to 1400m, through ‘fields’ of coffee. Beautiful!

This is really what Ticos are raving about – coffee here is a huge source of national pride. This tiny country produces 2% of the worlds coffee, and is the 11th biggest producer in the world. Doka Estate has been owned and managed by the local Vargas family for three generations now; they are practically a national institution.

Out of the bus window

Yet all the coffee is arabica (referring, confusingly, to the African variety of coffee, as opposed to the Asian robusta). It is harvested entirely by Nicaraguans and Panamanians. It is then roasted to French Roast level to go in French Press coffee makers, or to a darker espresso roast to go in Italian espresso machines. The rest is exported, mainly to the United States. A proportion is decaffeinated using the Swiss water method and exported to Germany. And yet the bag of the stuff I’ve just bought still proudly says “100% Costa Rican” on it….

I would like to know where all the machines are made, which process the coffee. One thing very striking about Doka Estate was the fact that virtually everything is automated. This is a very large farm, its 2000 manzanas produces an average of 9000, 100lb sacks of coffee per year. With production on this scale, ‘traditional’ or manual methods, such as those I found in Nicaragua, just wouldn’t be effective. As well as these practical issues, however, the people at Doka believe that this machinary actually improves the quality of the coffee. This is news to me, since for the past few months I’ve been fed the notion that traditional, romantic and artesan methods are the best.

It is Big.

Take, for example, the huge Chancadora machine. Similar to the one at Cafe Britt, it is designed not only to remove the fruit from enormous volumes of coffee, it also automatically sorts it into three quality grades. Each grade of coffee is then depulped separately, using three different sieves, and then fed into three different fermentation tanks, so the coffee can be washed separately too, to avoid mixing and contamination. I don’t know how many people would have to be employed to do this without the machine – but it would at least be in double figures. It eliminates the need for all those hours I spent sorting seemingly identical coffee beans by hand.
The most ingenious part of the machine, however, is the fact that the whole thing operates without electricity! No expensive waste of energy.

I hope he never falls in!

The fruit is initially sorted by dropping the cherries into water. Those that float are third grade quality, the stuff you can’t export, along with twigs and leaves and caterpillas and anything else that accidently ends up in the pickers basket. These are scooped off the top of the water and delivered to the third grade depulper. Similarly, the second grade stuff sort of hangs in the middle of the water, and the excellent, premium stuff is right at the bottom. They can easily be separated like this and processed independently. But what makes the whole thing work, is that this pool of water is 5 metres deep! It can sort 250 cajuelas (a cajuela is 25lb of fruit) at a time. The weight of all that water is enough to power the mill, it turns all the depulping drums and forces the cherries through the sieves. Clever stuff.

Just like a huge Tumble dryer!

Some electricity is used to power the large drying drum. This looks like a huge tumble dryer, where they second and third grade beans are dried. The premium grade beans are still dried in the sun, and turned over every 45 minutes by armies of (usually) women walking up and down in the heat with huge rakes. This improves the quality, apparently, because occasionally dehydrating the beans too quickly can impede the flavour. Assuming the tumbledryer thing must be expensive to run and that bean raking must be a good local source of employment, I asked why not all the beans were dried on the patios. This time is was for efficiency reasons. The beans take 24 hours to dry in the drum, but 5 days in the sun – thats if, of course, you can get 5 days of solid sunshine, halfway up a volcano in the tropics.

Finally, they also have a big trillar (which removes the dried parchment from the green bean) and Oliver-esque sorting machine at their drying mill further up the road. There was one of these machines at Solcafe in Matagalpa, it was big and new and exciting, and they had befriended it and named it ‘Oliver’, which I thought was rather cute. The Doka machine has no name, but performs the same function as dear Oliver, that is, automatically sorting the beans again, by size, weight, density and colour.

A bit of the Mighty "Oliver"

The more sorting that is done, the better the quality. At Solcafe, before the arrival of Oliver, 48 women were employed to do this by hand, requiring intense concentration and excellent eye sight. This machine can do the job of 48 people, quicker and more effectively.

Despite all this, however, Doka still employs about 450 people full time, and 600 extra for the harvest season. I was very, very, intrigued when my guide, Angel, (yep, really, and he was a bloke too) told me that all the coffee pickers were migrant workers from Nicaragua. I´d also just found an article in the newspaper about Panamanian coffee pickers coming to Costa Rica for the harvest too. Given that both Nicaragua and Costa Rica produce coffee themselves, what are the incentives of coming here for four months of the year? And more importantly, are there not Ticos who can do it??

The incentive is of course, money. At Doka, each picker gets paid $1.50 for every cajuela of coffee they pick, and a good picker can get 10-15 cajuelas a day. There are also other benefits. all the temporary workers are given accomodation at Doka, and there is a kindergaten for accompanying children as well. But this still is not a lot of money. Angel had no idea what these people did for the rest of the year, either. Ticos are apparently not keen to pick coffee, even those who are unemployed much prefer to get temporary work in factories than on farms. Angel actually said they were lazy! I asked if they ever turned anyone away who turned up to work. He said No, only when they had enough people, but it is usually the same people who come year after year. They do not need any specific skills, they just have to pick only the ripe, red cherries, and it is in their own interest to do it quickly.

This is an interesting point. Up until now, I´d be mentally linking skills with quality. Nicaraguans certainly put a lot of effort and labour into producing their coffee, and in doing so, increase the quality. There is much to be said for the idea of “artesan” production, that lovely image of the farmer caring about his crop so much, he does all the work by hand… But all these machines at Doka, and similar farms, take away the need for human labour, and as such, take all the skill out of the production. The machines are very clever, granted, and somebody with a lot of creative, technical skills designed them in the first place. But in this context, the skill is not actually in the continuing production, but yet, the quality equals, if not exceeds, that of the more “artesan” coffee.

In socio-economic terms, these machines negate the need to employ quite so many people on these coffee farms. It is only the picking that cannot be done by machine. The Panamanians and Nicaraguans who migrate to Costa Rica for the harvest every year, might well possess the skills, (or would be capable of learning them,) to sort coffee beans, or rake the patios and so on, and so Costa Rica could also produce artesan, “handmade” coffee if it wanted to. However, it seems to be making a considerable profit selling the machine-processed, yet very high quality coffee anyway. Consequently, it would appear that quality is not directly linked to skills, and that artesan coffee is merely an option for those who cannot access machines!

Doka Estate´s range of quality coffees

Costa Rica, Culture Shock and Cafe Britt

FANFARE! This is the first official blog from Costa Rica. I made it here after a very long and bizarre journey on a boat, on which I first experienced Japanese porn. I also didn’t get any sleep for a good 36 hours, and just to improve my mood no end, I was robbed. As such, my first day in Costa Rica was spent half asleep, queuing up to get police reports (not that I have any hope that they will find my camera etc, but merely because my insurance demands it) and then scouring San Jose in search of new USB leads. (of all the things to steal??). Consequently, my first impressions of Costa Rica were not good.

My first week here has not really done much to alleviate this. I am not a fan, so far. I am not seeing any of this Pura Vida everyone is advertising. Actually I think my vida was purer in Nicaragua. San Jose, being the capital, is huge and sprawling, a lot more pleasant than Managua, but very westernised, or at least, Americanised, and ludicrously expensive for Central America. I think I am spending more here than I would at home!! Worse still, I am now living out in the pits of suburbia, with Emma’s sister in law, Olga-Marie. She and her family are nice enough, but certainly not as daft or as outgoing as Emma, and I rarely see them anyway, they are all at work all day. There is absolutely nothing in this suburb, everyone just drives their 4×4 into the city. And its mind bogglingly ugly, especially in comparison with the beautiful mountains surrounding the area. My only saving graces here are Rosibel, the overworked but perma-cheerful ‘empleada’ (i will not say ‘Maid’) and Abuela, who is 86, healthy, carefree and can happily drink me under the table. She likes her beer.

At 86, she has an impressive tolerance for alcohol.

But what of the coffee??
Well, I have begun work very quickly so far because I am of the belief that the quicker I get the information I need, the sooner I can leave (yep, I really dislike it that much!). I found a lovely coffee shop hidden in the depths of the Mercado Central, where they roast their own coffee on site.

Smells divine

Whilst gazing in awe at the roaster and breathing in that magnificent scent of coffee, I got chatting the bloke sitting next to me. He was of the opinion that Costa Rican coffee was the best in the world. I laughed and told him that I’d just spent three months in Nicaragua where they say exactly the same thing about their own coffee. This provoked an almost violent rant about Nicaraguans – he’d never heard of Nicaraguan coffee being applauded as world class (although it has been, several years running). Nicaragua is an ugly, dangerous place, apparently, and ‘they all come over here’.I said I’d loved my time there, met some great people and the first day I got to Costa Rica, I was robbed. His response? “it was probably a Nicaraguan who robbed you.” I invited him to visit Britain someday. I think he’d fit in well…particularly with the Tory party, for instance.

Blue skies... good coffee

What we were drinking, however, was coffee from Cafe Britt. Cafe Britt are based up in Heredia, a big town about half an hour from San Jose. They have the biggest wet mill in the country, and offer Coffee Tours for tourists. I decided it was a good place to start, so I headed up there on the full day, Coffee Lovers Tour.

It was actually really fun. Definitely designed for tourists, they turned a trip round the plantation into a theatre performance. The ‘actors’ obviously love what they do and put a lot of energy into their performances. But at the same time, it was still informative. We zipped through the plantation,

Hats not compulsory

where our guide, Jose-Antonio, showed us the different layers of the bean with a giant plastic demo bean (Made in China), and interestingly pointed out that you only actually use 20% of the coffee berry. The fruit flesh, muscelage, and parchment are all removed, as is the moisture content. Costa Rica has actually passed a law saying farms have to recycle this fruit – and so at Cafe Britt, they mix it with chicken manure and use it as fertilizer. They also keep the dried parchment after trilling, and mix it with fibres from banana leaves to make paper. Guess where my next Lovely Notebook is coming from??

Cafe Britt buys in coffee from over 1000 different farms in Central Valley, and process it all at Tierra Madre, their huge beneficio or wet mill. They also sell three types of coffee, at different levels of quality. This made me prick up my ears. They definitely associate ‘organic’ produce with quality. Their ‘first grade’ coffee, the expensive stuff, is organic certified, and shade grown at altitude. This is marketed as Cafe Britt’s own brands; they do a dark roast, a light roast and an espresso roast. The second grade is still considered gourmet, and is shade grown at altitude as well, but they are allowed to use chemical pesticides on this stuff as necessary. This is where you get Cafe Britt single origin coffees, from Volcan Poas, Tres Rios and Terrazu, specific coffees from specific areas. These two types are exported and sold nationally with the Cafe Britt logo. The third grade stuff is ‘café convencional’. This is not gourmet, it is not exported, and Cafe Britt do not put their name on it. It is not grown at altitude, and is not shaded, and consequently all manner of chemicals are used to force the stuff to grow where it would not grown naturally. So I asked where it went. Jose mumbled something about ‘national companies’, but wouldn’t give me names. I can draw my own conclusions!

A very clever machine

All of this coffee is processed at the same mill, however. Here, they call the depulping machine a chancador, not a despulpador, but its effectively the same thing. Except it is HUGE. And fully automated. No handcranking here! Same process as Nicaragua – beans are poured in to water, and the ones that float are removed; they are bad beans. But instead of becoming chicken feed, this stuff is sold to other food companies, as it is used to make coffee flavourings! Interesting! After squidging the beans out, this clever machine actually sorts the coffee for you – there are three different ’sieves’ to feed the beans into the three classes of coffee. The third grade sieve has to be made of harder materials, because the beans it processes are likely to be underripe, and therefore the fruit is harder to remove. Ingenious! Better still, Jose proudly claimed that, despite its size, this mill only uses 50% of the water is would normally require. All the ‘aguas de miel’ or dirty water is recycled – fermented anaerobically to make biogas, then filtered so that the remaining water can be used to irrigate the next crops.

The big pool where the waste water is purified

The washed beans are still dried naturally in the sun, and raked by hand. Cafe Britt also roast on the premises. Another huge machine can roast 100 tons of coffee per month. As such, they also have a cupping lab and expert cuppers to create the roast profiles of each batch of coffee. We got a very brief cupping demonstration as well, and I managed not to get it up my nose this time!! They can also decaffeinate the coffee (more, they say, for international markets than for Costa Rica. They agreed with me, decaff coffee is like nonalcoholic beer – pointless!) We even got a rather fun, hand drawn demo of the decaffeinating process (Swiss water method – ‘like giving the beans a sauna’).

Nice drawings, makes it all so clear!

Even more interestingly, the left over caffeine forms a white powder,which they sell to the likes of Coca Cola for use in energy drinks (BLEURGH!) and to the pharmaceuticals industry – it is that which goes into painkillers where they claim it’s ‘non-drowsy’!!

So. What can I conclude from this? 1.) I can’t afford to do many more ‘tours’ like this….
But sensibly. There is a lot of information about quality that can be drawn out from here, but for once, this doesn’t seem to lead to more waste. The waste at Cafe Britt, despite its huge size, seems very well managed. I think however, that it is exactly because of its size and success, that the company is able to manage its waste so well. It has the facilities to purify water and compost fruit on a huge scale, and can access markets for by-products of production. This is a very successful, nationally recognised company, but that does not necessarily mean it is typical of the Costa Rican coffee industry. What is typical, remains to be seen!

I didn´t see anyone looking like this, but its a nice image.

Nica Vs Tico

this time next week I will be on my way to Costa Rica. In a boat. I’ve already stayed in Nicaragua a month longer than I was expecting too, but I still reckon I could learn so much more if I stayed even longer… But I have a hubby and ferrets back home who I miss a great deal….

As for the coffee, one of the main reasons for this trip was to do comparisons between quality and waste on small, organic farms here, and massive commercial plantations in Costa Rica. Making those comparisons has so far been very easy, but not necessarily impartial. Telling people I am going to Costa Rica has met with mixed reactions, but none of them particularly positive.

One thing I love about Nicaraguans is the fact that they are all so opinionated. They are informed too, though, and very willing to voice their opinions, loudly and passionately, at every available opportunity. General consensus seems to be that Costa Rica is ‘bonita’ – pretty, but ‘caro’ – expensive. There are a lot more tourists there, which means the people are accustomed to seeing foreigners and I shouldn’t have to endure anymore “Chelita” cat calls and hissing from the ‘machistas’. Woohoo!!! But, at the same time, a lot of Nicas have warned me that ‘Ticos’ are ‘cerrado’ and ‘frio’ – not was warm and welcoming towards tourists as in Nicaraguans are.

When I have asked about Costa Rican coffee, I can rarely get past issues of national pride. Of course, all Nicaraguan coffee is much, much better than Tico coffee. ‘They don’t have the right geography’ (I am assuming this means climate, the volcanic soil, shade from cloud forest and altitude sound pretty similar to me). ‘They don’t do organic’ erm…. That remains to be seen, but I’m pretty confident they do. ‘It’s not good quality’ – why not? ‘it’s all machines, they don’t use traditional methods’. Ok, but I’ve still never worked out the advantage of ‘traditional methods’, other than the romance of it. I get the impression that farmers here would use machinery, if they could get hold of any. Such is national pride in their coffee however, that I’ve even had people tell me, including a respected journalist from one of the major newspapers, that sometimes Nicaraguan coffee is shipped to Costa Rica, repackaged and sold on as Tico coffee for a better price, meaning, of course, that Costa Rican coffee is only famous for being good quality because it’s actually Nicaraguan…..

You can’t engage in any debate like this in Nicaragua without dabbling in politics, which usually results in impassioned rants about the woeful state of the country, from both right and left wing supporters. Both sides agree, however, that the coffee industry is suffering immensely. From a Sandinista perspective, the country, and coffee production is crippled by the fact that Nicaragua is proudly left wing, and the ‘Gringos’ (Americans) won’t help, and won’t buy the coffee for this reason alone. The revolution bankrupted the country, (true, from whichever political perspective you happen to take) and all industries are still reeling from this. For the average Sandinista supporter, coffee growing is very much a nationalised, internal occupation, you grow your coffee to support your family and that’s it. There is little awareness of private investment, or of private companies actually profitting from the industry. Most of the big cooperatives here are government agencies. In turn, the Frente Sandinista de Liberacion Nacional (FSLN) is the party of the poor, who trust that they will provide. Who else do they have?

From the more right wing vantage point, both liberal and conservative, the coffee farmers are surviving but not succeeding, and this is because of a lack of vision, a lack of stimulus to desire more than just a means of survival, and that way of thinking is a direct result of years of Sandinista government. The farmers feed the cooperatives, and the cooperatives feed the government. No-one works in coffee for themselves, so no-one makes a profit anymore. They say, before the 80s, everything was better for coffee. But after the Sandinistas took charge, there has been no private investment in El Campo and coffee has, effectively, stagnated. There is no development. (this may well be true, but although the Nicaraguan revolution happened in the late seventies/early 80s, the International Coffee Agreement also collapsed in the 80s, and the price of coffee crashed. So certainly in Nicaragua is impossible to tell whether the current situation is a result of revolution or world economics!)

Nicaragua has the natural resources to be a very rich, prosperous country. But it lacks the organisation and infrastructure to make use of it’s natural advantages. And this is, undeniably, a result of decades of political upset, revolution, civil war, foreign intervention and governmental corruption, and that applies to both left and right.

Costa Rica, as far as I can tell at the moment, are rich enough, and prosperous enough, to have developed the infrastructure sufficiently within the country to allow coffee farmers to access international markets, and this access is, for the majority, independent of the government. Consequently, the quality of the coffee, whether Nica or Tico, is irrelevant. Costa Rica can market their coffee internationally, Nicaragua can’t, or at least can’t so easily. And this fact is inescapable, even if the Nicas are right, and they really do produce better coffee.

Never talk religion, politics or coffee.

A plan so cunning you could put a tail on it and call it a Weasel!!!

I have been charged with writing A Plan for this trip, for uni. My supervisors thinks it would be a good idea for me to really give some thought as to what I expect to find out there, and what I intend to do. This Plan may help reassure them, but it has the opposite effect on me. Thinking about what I actually hope to do makes me realise that I have No Idea of that. I just do not know what is going to happen. I’ve never done a trip like this where I actually have to *work* and produce something useful at the end of it. I am a great believer in this magical thing called “the luck of the traveller” and just trust that everything will always works out eventually – and it always has before.

There is added Worry on this trip because I am going via this conference in Ohio. It will be my first big international conference, the first time I’ve ever been to America, and I’m going on Halloween, and four days before the US election, in one of the few states that is still completely undecided in regards to the election. I’ve just looked it up today (15th) and the polls in Ohio put Obama at 48% and McCain at 46%….It could be really interesting, but I can’t trust myself to keep my big gob shut on my opinions!!

After Ohio, I get another two short flights to Nicaragua, which requires more preparation. Planning requires forethought and organisation. And maps. Maps are good, apparently.

This is, obviously, Nicaragua. I am heading towards the North west area, the El Porvenir coffee plantation is somewhere between Leon and Esteli; a “bone-jarring two hour drive uphill”. This is about as good as the directions get, but it certainly doesn’t sound like the sort of place that has paved roads and regular, punctual bus services!! I am flying in to Managua, and arrive at 9.30pm. I am going to have to stay in Managua the first night which I am not looking forward to, because Managua is an ugly, noisy, hot, smelly, often dangerous atrocity. But there we go. I have somewhere booked for the first night – an ecolodge place called Los Felipes, which sounds nice actually (“nice” being a code word for “has air conditioning”).

After that, I am going to head to Granada for a few days, to acclimatise, meet up with Donna, see the kids and the clowns, and try out Cafe Chavalos (a wonderful project where Donna has got former street kids training as chefs and running a restaurant themselves.) Cafe Chavalos uses El Porvenir’s coffee after all, and Donna (I hope) will be able to give me a little more information about the plantation itself. I then have the offer of this internship with the Jubilee House Community, who are the administrators of a great many community and NGO projects, including the El Porvenir plantation. They also export the coffee to Pittsburg (Donna’s ‘Building New Hope’ NGO is based there). JHC are based in Managua, so if I go and work with them, it will mean spending the first month at least in the capital. Whereas I know there are more pleasant places to spend a month, I do think the JHC internship will be very useful indeed. I can interview the people there about coffee exporting – these are the people in charge of judging the ‘quality’ of the coffee, as well as making sure the plantation, and the coffee itself, adheres to the requirements and standards that its organic and fairtrade certifications require. I also hope that they can get me better access to the plantation itself since they work so closely with the El Porvenir community – which will be invaluable in both social and logistic terms! I am not sure exactly who I am going to meet at JHC, I have the name of one contact, and that is all. But I hope to do at least a few in depth, but individual interviews with the people who work there, particularly with regards to ideas of quality and about the certification. Finally, if I can do something useful – as in, practical work in the export office or something, I’d rather do that, try and give something back to the organisation in return, since they are helping me out so much!

After the first month, I am going to head up to El Porvenir on my own – I am hoping that I should know some people there well enough by that time to do my own thing without the JHC.  November -February is harvest season, so I expect things to be pretty manic. I don’t know yet how El Porvenir operates: I’m told it’s owned collectively by around 40 families, but I don’t know if anyone has specific roles. If so, I’d need to interview different people involved in different stages of production; coffee pickers, sorters, dryers, etc and also find out how it is de-pulped (as in, getting the cherry flesh off the bean) – is this done by machine? Who operates this? What happens to the leftovers? Is it done this way deliberately to improve the coffee quality? I’ll interview  the farm manager if there is one, and I’d also be interested to see if they hire any extra workers during the harvest, and where these come from and so on.

Then it’s gonna be Christmas and my Carl is coming out to visit and we’re going Volcano hiking from the black beaches of Ometepe island…. Yay!!

In January, I’ll head to Costa Rica overland on the lovely Ticabuses to San Jose, where I will attempt to do the same thing again, only at Doka Estate on the side of Volcan Poas, a massive commercial farm that supplies Starbucks – so their ideas of quality will be really important! (If the green coffee from this farm is as good quality as their website will have you believe, the fact that Starbucks coffee tastes so bad MUST be because of their roasters… right? Charbucks!!)  Again, this is entirely conjecture at the moment, but I imagine processes in this plantation to be a lot more automated; the sheer volume of coffee produced would seem to require it. Does this produce more waste or less? Perhaps less human labour involved then, so less “human waste” – of effort and skill? Also, I expect that labour to be rather less permanent; Doka Estate is not community owned, it is a private endeavour, so they might well just hire in seasonal workers. Actually, I hope I can join in and pick coffee! Whoever I interview in Nicaragua, I will try to interview the equivalent people in Costa Rica so I can make meaningful comparisons.

Costa Rica is potentially problematic, however, because Doka Estate is located so far out of the nearest town that transport would be difficult and expensive, and possibly not that safe – and I don’t have the equivalent of Jubilee House to pave the way for me in terms of making contacts there. There is a B&B actually on the farm which they suggested I stay at! Woohoo! But: Doka Estate also offer touristy Coffee Tours where a guide explains the workings of the farm to you, and you can then stay at this B&B/ecolodge as part of the ‘experience’. I do not really need to see the Coffee Tour because I am cynical enough to believe that would be a very airbrushed version of events, I want to see the real thing, which could be pretty difficult. Also, the B&B cost $85 a night!!!!

I’ve found a hostel in Alajuela (nearest town) for $15 a night which sounds far more reasonable, except I would then have to negotiate how I am going to get up the volcano every day – at 15km it’s not exactly walkable, and I don;t think there is a bus. So, hitch? Not a great plan. Taxi? Could prove more expensive than staying at the B&B… I have even been toying with the idea of doing my CBT and hiring a little motorbike out there… Given my driving skills though, this could be even more dangerous than hitch-hiking!!

Meh. This part of the plan, I honestly cannot do right now. There is no way of knowing what to do until I get there and see what the situation is. Something will turn up!!

But I do know where to head, at least, and I’ve got a pretty good idea of what I want to do, who to interview, what info I need to collect etc. I just can’t be more specific than that at the moment! I am surrounded by guidebooks and travel insurance policy documents and Teach Yourself Spanish books and boxes of anti-malarial tablets… this is enough preparation for me!! Of course the other part of the plan is working out how to record all this data (I have a notebook with a picture of a cappuccino on it! yay!). I have a 4gb memory card for my uber-phone, and the guidebooks tell me where there are interweb cafes to send it all back to the uni! It will be Fiiiine. Trust me, I might be a Doctor (soon).

Tengo miedo, gente. Por favor, deseame mucho suerte – lo necessito! Adios!

Dreams and Distractions

So, it now looks like Costa Rica. And Nicaragua. Possibly sooner than I thought, as well. Christmas in the Carribean? I am supposed to be constructing Cunning Plans to make this a definite possibility (“A plan so cunning you could tie a tail on it and call it a weasel”) and I am…in a way. I would LOVE to go back to Nicaragua, but it doesn’t feel real yet. I don’t think I am the same person as I was the last time I disappeared to Latin America on a whim.

Instead I am dreaming and thinking and planning and fantasising about The Highly Improbably. I am collecting a diverse group of the Mentally Interesting it seems, and any idea reinterpreted through the minds of the Loons must, therefore, be borderline genius. The fine line has not so much been crossed as jumped on, scuffed, and bent to at least a 45 degree angle…One of the most Mentally Interesting is currently snoring upstairs. “Lets dance to Joy Division, celebrate the irony, everything is going wrong but we’re so happy!”

And what could be more sane, rational and sensible than planning my cafe? Sure, I have no money, no real capital, no time, no experience, no venue (this is NOT going to happen in Darlington. Ever. Understood?!) a crap credit rating, a doctorate to do, a mortgage to pay, plans to emigrate to the other side of the world in three years time, and family plans, but… hell, why not?

All I actually want to do with myself in the future is run my own cafe. I don’t actually need a PhD to do that, but I am at least learning far too much about coffee at the moment that I feel I’ve got to put this knowledge to use somehow! So, the cafe will be called Doctor Coffee’s. We will serve only the best, fair trade, highest quality (and probably Latin American) coffees made by skilled baristas. And it’s not going to be entirely espresso either! How revolutionary is that?

And I will cook. Lots. There is not going to be pannini in sight!! No fake Italianess, but Latino food, as authentic as I can make, and as designed by the experts at CafeChavalos in Nicaragua and Senora Julia in Peru, who’s recipes I am still using now! If amazing foods like quesedillas, tetelas, picarones and anticuchos can be made on the streets in Leon or Huancayo, I see no reason why I couldn’t make them in a cafe.

I was going to sell Cyberllama goods at the cafe too – Peruvian oddities for anyone interested. Carl and I started talking of this YEARS ago… he was going to get involved and turn it in to an internet cafe, and be responsible for the technical side of things. That was… 2002 I think. Nowadays, there wouldn’t be much call for internet cafes…the world changes too quickly. Now, he says he’ll support any mad scheme of mine, as long as he gets to keep a massive aquarium set into one wall – with piranhas in, of course, just to keep the Amazonian feel!

These plans have been delayed and postponed because we’ve never yet been in the position to even take ourselves seriously. We are full of intentions of moving to Vancouver post-PhD, and that would make a far better base for business than Darlington! But still… that is three years away. I am not a patient person, it seems….

And then the Mental Interesting contigent keep putting ideas in my head. A very dangerous activity. We have RASC – our writing group, full of the slightly eccentric creative types for whom even the most impractical ideas are a source of excitement. RASC currently meets in the overpriced and relatively atmosphere-deficient cafe at the Arts Centre. Wouldn’t it be so much more inspiring if we had our own venue? A writing cafe? That way, it wouldn’t be a business, it would be an arts venture. And we could get Arts grants, as opposed to business loans, and it would even be a community development and/or socially helpful project – it would provide gainful employment and a creative/productive outlet for the Mentally Interesting, teenage stench or otherwise unemployable members of our little town… With a little help from my friends, I could almost do it at the same time as my degree! And, the most bizarrely sensible suggestion yet: save on leases and business rates – set up my Gaggia machine in a caravan and have a travelling cafe! A Magic Cafe that pops up on request and is never in the same place twice! Yes yes yes!!!

(You can tell I’ve had my caffeine now, can’t you?)

Sigh. It would be so good.

And so to work….

First official attempt at coffee cupping

Disclaimers:
I know how cupping should be done; I know that I am supposed to use very small samples of single origin green coffee beans, roasted to order to a light Vienna or half-City roast. I should then grind these to French Press level – not too coarse, not too fine. Then I have to smell it. Then I add boiled water straight on top of the beans, and allow it to cool and for the grinds to settle. After that I break the ‘crust’ – that is, all the grinds still forming a skin on the surface of the liquid, with my trusty Cupping Spoon, smell it again, then slurp it off the spoon, and slosh it round my mouth. Unlike wine tasting, I have to swallow it, because I am also supposed to record the aftertaste as well. After washing mouth out with water, I am supposed to repeat this with many different types of coffee from many different origins. There are people who are paid to do this. These people, be it unwittingly in some cases, hold a great deal of power: if they don’t like the flavours and aromas of the coffees they’ve cupped, it doesn’t command a high price globally. Given the state of the gree coffee market at the moment, this can actually mean life or death, survival or starvation for the farmers.

Not wishing to demonstrate any signs of hubris, I am not going to ‘cup’ in this manner. Mainly because I can’t – I have no access to green beans, single origin or otherwise. I have no roasting machine. I do not have a grinder of sufficient quality. Also, pouring hot water on to coffee grounds does not for a pleasant drink make, anyway. And finally, because I sincerely doubt anyone really cares what I think of coffee.

Instead, what I have got is independent-coffee-shop house blend, called Mokarabia. It’s an 100% arabica blend, from Costa Rica and Mexico. Espresso roasted – that is, very dark, the grinds are almost black, and still shiny with oils. (which is unusual for 100% arabica). This roast has less of the sweetness and caffeine, and more of the smoky, heavy flavours, designed to make good, Italian style espresso. I am putting it in my little French Press pot – a cafetiere to anyone who isn’t American. This means that the coffee is squashed through the hot water and reserved. I won’t get the ‘crust’ to break through as I would with traditional cupping, but this method does at least produce a palatable cup of coffee!!

At first sniff, the ground coffee smells delicious. Not a strong, overpowering smell – though this is possibly because it is not freshly ground. It is sweet, like melting black chocolate, but the smell in the air is more vanilla and caramel. It is almost synthetic, far more like the blasphemous Frappe Lattes at Caffe Nero, where the tiniest amount of espresso is drowned in a pint of milk and blended with vanilla-sugar powder. To me, this would make a good after-dinner coffee, possibly with a shot of rum in it.

Pouring on the hot water releases a whole new array of smells; not very pleasant ones, either. Very acrid and slightly bitter, and smoky to the point of being burnt. Hot rubber: like burning tyres from a distance. You know it’s there but it’s not choking. Nothing like the scent of the grounds on their own, but also nothing like the scent you are supposed to perfume your home with to lure estate agents….

Pressing it and pouring it rids it of unpleasant burnt aromas, it is still smoky but with a savoury, nutty tone. On first taste, there are walnut notes, a slight metallic base. The flavour is acidic but not heavy. A big slurp (and I like doing this) results in a full, strong but bright flavour – ‘clean’ in that it doesn’t cling round the mouth, and there are some hints of the fruity black chocolate that the original smell promised. The aftertaste is nicely bitter but floral – to me, it tastes like eating dandelion stalks. It does not linger too long.

Interestingly, in swigging this (8oz cup, black, unadulterated), I still get the little buzz of the stimulants. I know that this blend/roast would rid the coffee of most of its natural caffeine, so maybe it is psychological. The colour and the fragrance give the impression that this is strong coffee, and guzzling any hot liquid quickly and actually concentrating on the drink must focus and stimulate the brain a little!

Such is my first recorded tasting. I don’t think I’ll be indulging in this experiment again. As with any food critiquing, identifying flavours and fragrances has a tendency to sound highly pretentious. Also, I don’t think it says anything useful about the coffee. Dandelions, metallic notes, burning tyres, bitter black chocolate, smoke, acidity… none of them sound particularly appealing! Overall, the coffee tastes good. It tastes like Good Coffee. I may not be a supertaster, with my tongue honed and trained to pick up every little subtlety, but then, that doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate coffee. I certainly drink enough of it. Personally, although finding these flavours is interesting, and testing my taste ability is a new experience, I can’t see much use in being able to pronounce a coffee ‘floral’ or ‘acidic’ or even why I should want to!