My Life in Coffee

Time for some pretty pictures.
It occurs to me that I’ve been messing around in the coffee industry for six years now. I’ve had a lot of adventures and learned a huge amount. Coffee has taken me all over the place, from the Voodoo Cafe in Darlington in 2006 (where it all began in earnest), Durham for Caffe Nero in 2007, to Sheffield for the PhD for the next four and a half years, London for Caffe Culture and other research gigs on numerous occasions, then Ohio, and Guatemala City for conferences in 2010, six months in Nicaragua and Costa Rica for fieldwork in 2008-9, back to Darlington for my coffee van in 2009, Afternoon Tease in 2010, my first ever North East Coffee Festival and Doctor Coffee’s Cafe in 2011, and finally to Regina, Saskatchewan for 13th Ave Coffee House in 2012. Oh and my book is being published by a German publisher. It’s been quite a journey!

Here’s some highlights! These are in no particular order and there are a lot of them!

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What makes a good coffee shop?

My wonderful husband gave me an Idea this morning when we were chatting online. This Idea is growing and evolving already.

Also, my friend pointed this out to me: http://www.thegridto.com/life/food-drink/playful-grounds/

But first, a little research. Please help me out here and answer me this:
What, in your opinion/experience as a customer makes a good coffee shop?

 

I’ve posted the same question on google+ and twitter, and here are some of the responses so far:

Aside from the obvious, (good coffee) lots of nice sofas, always dissapointed when I can’t get a comfy seat,friendly staff too 🙂

clean, free wi-fi, good food and coffee and open early in the morning

aside from good, straughtforward coffee… Comfy armchairs. Newspapers. Nice cake.

open way freaking late. like 2am or 24 hours. There have been a few coffee shops locally that tried to do this. I liked having somewhere to go and get feen’d up and hack on stuff in the wee hours. Baristas that know a good mix when they taste it, and can reliably reproduce a tasty treat. I like it when baristas have a drink that’s distinctly their own. Obviously, I prefer they not be the type that’d correct someone who asks for a “medium” latte.

Comfortable and clean. Non-wobbly tables and non-scrapey chairs. Not echoey. I hate having to hear scraping chairs and wobbling tables banging about or loud people from the front of the shop as though they were right beside me. NO METAL CHAIRS! They’re not comfortable to sit in, clang, and are bloody cold in winter.

More to come I hope! Please feel free to add your comments below too! all appreciated.

 

The fishnets gets even more tangled…

This, ladies and gentlemen, is currently what my thesis plan looks like. This was a collaborative effort with my supervisors. I hope you all appreciate it for its abstract beauty…..

The Plan (Version 1.0)

Ye gads people…. HELP ME.

 

Mi proyecto – en español

Mi nombre es Annabel Townsend y soy una estudiante de la Universidad de Sheffield en Inglaterra. Tengo un proyecto para mi tesis de post-grado sobre café en Nicaragua y Costa Rica. Me gustaría conversar con ustedes sobre esto.

Estoy en el segundo año de mi post-grado. En el último año, he estado leyendo documentos académicos sobre la producción de café, la historia del café en América Latina, y también sobre globalización y los mercados internacionales.

Antes, estudiaba Antropología. Este proyecto es desde el departamento de Geografía Humana en mi universidad, y todavía tengo un interés fuerte en estudios culturales, también de café y socio-económicos.

Mi proyecto ahora es con un programa de búsqueda se llama “The Waste of the World” o La Basura del Mundo, y financiada por el Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) en Inglaterra. El objetivo de este programa es estudiar conceptos de basura y calidad en las industrias globales. Soy una de tres estudiantes trabajando con las industrias internacionales de comidas y agriculturas y he escogido estudiar sobre café porque es la segunda industria más grande en el mundo, y también la ‘calidad’ es muy importante en los mercados de hoy.

Mi intención con este proyecto es seguir los granos de café desde la producción en las fincas aquí en Nicaragua, hasta los beneficios de cafè, y las cooperativas, y entonces a tostadores en Inglaterra y finalmente a los cafetines y tiendas de café en mi país. Quiero conocer las diferencias entre café orgánico de Nicaragua, y café convencional de Costa Rica, porque en Inglaterra, usamos los dos igualmente. Estoy interesada en las diferencias en sabor y calidad, y también en los métodos de producción.

Después de mi trabajo en Nicaragua y Costa Rica, voy a regresar a Inglaterra, donde tengo contactos con compañías de café. Espero trabajar y estudiar en una compañía de tostadores internacionales, se llama Coburg Coffee Company en Londres. Coburg Coffee Company tuestan café para una compañía grande de cafetines en Inglaterra, se llama Caffe Nero. Caffe Nero tienen cerca de 400 tiendas de café en el país. Desde hace dos años, yo he trabajado en Caffe Nero como una Barista, entonces, conozco la compañía muy bien.

Mis estudios con estas compañías será el mismo que en Nicaragua. Explorare sus conceptos de calidad en la producción de café, y también me gustaría ver qué pasa con basura que generan en los diferentes procesos.

La información que yo recolecte estará publicada en mi tesis en mi universidad y también en parte del programa de Waste of the World. Todos los detalles estarán disponibles desde esta universidad en Inglaterra, y daré créditos a todos mis colaboradores. Pero, si ustedes prefieran, pueden ser anónimos. No voy a incluir información sin consentimiento de ustedes.

Agradeciendo mucho su ayuda y su colaboración con este proyecto. He incluido mis preguntas preliminares para ustedes, y espero podamos conversar mas en el futuro.
Muchas gracias.

 

The coffee process – on a tiny Farm near La Corona, Nicaragua

I stayed on this tiny, remote farm with the Cano Salgada family, near La Corona

The coffee grew everywhere – I had to fight my way through it to get to the “toilet”

Baby coffee plants are called “Little Soldiers” – these are around 2 or 3 years old

Picking had to be done over several weeks, as not all the cherries matured at the same time

Information about the mushrooms – instead of using chemical insecticides, they use spores of a fungus which infect the brocas (coffee weevils) and make them explode! Cool in a gruesome sort of way, and of course, all organic.

My hosts, Bernabe and Maximina – coffee basket in hand

I got to pick coffee! It was actually pretty difficult only picking the ripest berries. Harvesting goes on for about a month.

Picking is all done by hand – on this farm, by only two people

Where the coffee is depulped – cherry flesh is removed from the beans using a machine (kept in the locked shed for fear of theft!)

All the used cherries are composted as fertiliser for the next crop.

Beans are washed in running water to remove the mucelage (called “miel” – honey)

Rinsing like this also removes any bad beans – rotton ones or those with bugs will float to the surface.

The water (agua de miel) just runs off into the land – this water is seriously acidic and dirty and is a major pollutant.

The bad beans are just discarded and either rot on the ground or eaten by chickens

The washed beans are dried out to about 40% humidity on racks suspended off the ground, and turned over every 20 mins

These are good beans, still in their parchment. All the dried beans have to be hand sorted.

These are bad beans. Differences are difficult to spot and sorting like this takes HOURS.

A week´s work – about 120lb of excellent quality coffee

From experiences on Finca El Ranchita, 2km outside the village of La Corona, Matagalpa.

The farm is owned by Bernabe Cano Salgada, he lives with his wife Maximina, one son, one daughter, one daughter-in-law, one neice and seven grandchildren, although he has another son and daughter and more grandchildren living elsewhere as well.
The farm is 5 manzanas (a manzana is 1.73 acres), 2 manzanas are coffee, the rest is maize and chiltoma (a type of chilli) crops and pasture for their 12 cows. There are also quite a few chickens.

The coffee is all organic, no fertilizer or pesticides are used. It is also grown under shade of banana, orange and avocado trees and some remaining natural forest. The farm lies at an altitude of about 800m above sea level, and is irrigated from the Penas Blancas river that runs through the Yasica Sur mountain range.
The coffee is entirely arabica, a mixture of caturra and bourbon varieties.

Harvest season for the coffee is mid november to mid december. All the picking is done by hand, with baskets tied round the waist to hold the cherries. The coffee trees are tall, some over 8ft, and occasionally the trees have to be half pulled over to reach the cherries at the top. (i am not much below 6ft so i was actually very useful in this respect!) Harvesting takes a month, even with such a small crop because not all the cherries become ripe at the same time, and so each tree has to be picked repetitively until all the fruit are mature.

Bernabe and his daughter in law, Antoña, seem to do the majority of the harvesting by themselves, working ten hour days. Maximina works in the house, and their son Leonardo looks after the maize crop. Antoña’s 4 children all try and help pick coffee too, but only the eldest, 12 year old Lucy, can actually work effectively, (when she is not at school) the others (all under ten) can’t reach the trees!

After picking, the coffee has to be depulped (that is, removing the fruit flesh from the beans) the same day. First the cherries are tipped into a tub of clean water. Those that float are bad – either with bugs in (making air holes) or sometimes with only one bean inside the cherry, not two. These bad beans are scooped off the top, and composted.

The depulping machine mixes the cherries with just enough water to soften the fruit, and then simply presses the fruit until the hard beans in the centre squash out. The beans will sink and the fruit floats. The beans are then let out the bottom of the machine, and the cherry pulp removed from the top. Bernabe drains the fruit pulp and then feeds it all in to his worm farm where is is broken down into great compost.

The depulped beans, still in their muscelage, are left to ferment. Early harvested beans ferment for 18-24 hours, those later in the harvest for 36-48 hours. This has to be carefully monitored as over- or under- fermenting can ruin the quality of a whole batch. Generally, the longer it ferments, the sweeter the flavour, but it can easily get too sweet and taste alcoholic!

After fermentation, the beans are washed again, in running water. Any flesh remaining will float and can be removed and composted. The water also carries away the muscelage called Miel, or honey (it does actually taste sweet). The run-off water is cloudy and called ‘agua de miel’. On this farm is was just left to drain into the soil- although it’s acidity cannot be good for the earth. Bernabe did not seem bothered about this.

The beans are then dried on a large mesh sheets supported on wooden frames, so the beans are always kept a few inches off the ground. They are turned over every 20 minutes so they dry evenly. Drying at this stage reduces the water content of the beans to about 40-45%. In good weather (not guaranteed in the mountains) drying only takes 2 hours, but they have to be very careful because it can rain very suddenly and unexpectedly, and rained on beans are ruined beans.

Once dry, they are sorted. This can take several hours. Bernabe (and often as not, anyone else who is around) has to go through and meticulously pick out the bad beans that have survived the other processes. Broken beans, those with chipped parchment, those with small holes as a signs of broca bugs. It is boring, time consuming, slightly hypnotic and requires a lot of concentration and good eyesight. However, this is what makes good quality – one bad beans can spoil 30 good ones. And you need about 50 beans to make one espresso. The beneficio will check and if there are too many, he will not be able to sell that sack.

Technically, the bad beans picked out at this stage end up either as worm or chicken food, although Bernabe said occasionally the family keep them, toast them over the fire and use that coffee for family breakfast. I tried it to see if I could tell the difference knowing I was drinking low quality stuff. However, they all insist on heaping so much sugar into it that it was impossible to tell. It smelt amazing as it was roasting though.

The finished coffee is packed into waterproofed sacks of 100lb each (some farms use 60lb bags instead which seems to be more conventional) and the trip is made to the beneficio (processing plant) which for this co-operative is a two hour journey, the otherside of Matagalpa. We hitched a lift clinging on to the back of a neighbour’s truck who was also going to the city. After that we had to get ourselves and 100lb of coffee on a bus for the remainder of the trip. Bernabe’s family do not own a vehicle, and as the beneficio require the coffee to be as fresh as possible, this trip has to be negotiated once a week during harvest season.

Bernabe can get $180 a sack for his coffee (thus, ‘better than fair trade’ price of $126, although the cooperative is fairtrade certified) as it usually achieves 80-85 points on the SCAA’s cupping scale (making it a “speciality” coffee), but the journey to the mill alone, without a lift, will cost him $2.30 a week on top of the ongoing costs of running the farm. The sheer amount of manual work and skill that go into this process is incomparable with the income it commands, particularly with a family of thirteen to feed. Bernabe and Antoña effectively work for $1.80 an hour, for 200 hours a year during the harvest season, and have to make that income last for the other 11 months, feeding their enormous family, maintaining the farm, paying bills and supplemented only by income from their other small crops, and the money their children send from the cities to help support the grandchildren.

On a personal note, it really made me feel terrible for working at Caffe Nero for so long. Sure their coffees are expensive, but for a £2.30 latte, the two espressos in it costs the company 4p. The amount farmers like Bernabe receive from each latte we drink in the UK comes to a fraction of a penny. I gave the family as much as i could for my stay there – the equivalent of what would have paid staying at a hotel and eating in a restaurant for a week. I also gave the kids a present of 30 cordobas each – about a pound. Best fiver i’ve ever spent – that buys them all a notebook for school and chocolate bars for a week.
I hope my reader(s) are dutifully feeling first world/middle class guilt now. And please don’t even contemplate buying Nescafe instant now you’ve read this. Muchas gracias.

 

Selva Negra

Selva Negra – organic, sustainable coffee farm and nature reserve in Matagalpa

What a tropical rain storm looks like

Unripe beans, and the end product

In the dark and the rain, it all got a bit Blair Witch….

No professional backpacker should attempt jungle hikes without an umbrella

I am (a very wet) BEL OF THE JUNGLE!

The farm wet-processes coffee – but not usually with this much rain!!

The term “shade grown” was beginning to get a little ironic

What we were all looking for! These beans (when ripe) are all picked by hand, by the 600 extra workers they hire during the harvest season

At 1200m up in the mountains, the view of Matagalpa rising out of the mists was spectacular

Some genuine Coffee Kids who live on the farm, and attend the school there

Bananas are grown throughout the coffee crops to shade the plants. Workers can eat the fruit as they work, and the dead leaves are chopped up and used as cattle feed elsewhere on the farm.

Coffee husks/ parchment are burnt for cooking on in the kitchen.

The ashes from the cooking fires are mixed with water and left for a while to decompose, then used as fertilizer on the crops

This is ingenious. The red bottle is filled with coffee and alcohol. The colour and the smell attracted the ´brocas´(coffee-eating bugs that destroy the crops). They get drunk on the alcohol, then fall into the bottle and drown in the water. This protects the crop without using any chemicals etc.

one plant can produce a lot of beans! they also all ripen at different times, meaning that picking the harvest is done over several weeks, so that all the ripe cherries are collected.

Yuk. This is a pile of decomposing coffee fruit. It smells almost alcoholic (apparently you can make coffee wine from it)

The cherry mould is then fed to a Worm Farm who break it down for use as compost for the next crop.

The farm, at 12km out of Matalgalpa town, is pretty remote! The building on the right is part of the hydroelectric plant that provides electricity to the rest of the farm

The water pipe takes water to the turbine, but also provides irrigation to the steeper parts of the farm

My first visit to Selva Negra – a completely organic farm north of Matagalpa, set up and run by a German couple, Eddy and Mausi Kuhl. The farm produces around 5000 sacks of award winning, shade grown arabica coffee every year. There are 150 permenant workers there, all housed on site, paid $100 a month, given three meals a day and there´s even a school for the 64 children on the farm, and three baseball teams!
Eddy and Mausi took over in 1975, and reserved a third of the land to natural forest, a third for coffee, and the rest to farm buildings which house the workers and pasture for cattle, pigs and chickens. Eddy has written book, “Nicaragua y su cafe” – i’ve got to try and find that on Amazon! I met Eddy very briefly (as my guidebook says, they are both happy to give you a tour but only they are not busy, which is not often!). He seemed very enthusiastic when I said I was a student of coffee, and everyone else I’ve met says he never stops talking, so he could prove very handy for this project!

The coffee is processed at a ‘beneficio’ or mill which is attached to the main farm house. However, this roaster is very small, and they only roast a little for domestic sales – you can buy bags of their coffee in the souvenir shop or at the Coffee Museum in Matagalpa for instance. (and yes, i bought some!) 80% of the main crop is exported to the States, and the other 20% to Spain – this is all exported green (unroasted) however.

Unsurprisingly, the farm is certified organic, and also has the Rainforest Alliance stamp. In 1995 it won a “Semper Virens” award (‘always green’) from the International Ecological Summit. The only stamp they don’t carry is FairTrade – but they don’t need it. They are SCAA members, the coffee obviously commands a very steep price, even during the coffee crisis, and the workers are looked after very well indeed. This may be one example where I will agree with the Cup of Excellence people, it is quality coffee which makes money just by being high quality. However, this is also a large, private farm set in near-perfect coffee growing area. What they do here couldn’t necessary be done on tiny farms within community owned cooperatives.

The green credentials are extremely impressive however. The biggest polluter in coffee production, particularly in wet processing like this is waste water which is used to wash the coffee cherries off the beans. The water gets extremely acidic with the fruit juices and on most farms, is pumped into the nearest river. Here, however, it goes through a two-tank pressurised purification system that uses the porous volcanic rocks to filter the water. These tanks allow the juice to ferment until biogas can be collected – this is used for cooking on the farm. The remaining water makes its way round the farm in over 1km of PVC piping, and evertually makes it to their hydroelectric plant, which also uses natural streams and a lake to power the turbine and provide electricity to all the farm buildings.

Biogas and/or methane is also collected from an anaerobic digestor. All other organic waste, including human waste from the compost toilets, cattle manure and chicken waste/bedding is added to these digestors. Once the gases have been collected, the solid waste joins the decomposing coffee cherries as worm food in the delightfully enormous worm farm, and comes out again a few weeks later as perfect compost.

No part of the coffee plant is wasted, as even the husks (parchment) are burnt under the huge grills in the kitchen – apparently coffee-smoked meat tastes fantastic, and I can well believe it! (the restaurant on site serves authentic German smoked sausage from the farms pigs – i wonder if they were coffee smoked too? They were exceptionally good!) The ashes from these grills are then mixed with water, until they can be used as liquid fertiliser on the crops again.

Other plants are also used throughout the farm as natural, sustainable ways of crop protection. Banana trees shade the coffee and feed both the workers and the cows, tall, strong yucca plants provide windbreaks and protect against landslides, a special type of moss is grown specifically on slopes to avoid soil erosion in heavy rains (and trust me, there is a lot of heavy rain in those mountains!!) They even grow eucalyptus trees, then shred the leaves, mix them with water and spray it on the coffee plants as a natural insect repellant. Finally, the very clever red bottles trap the ‘brocas’ (coffee weevils) – but even they die drunk and happy.

I came away from this first trip mightily, mightily impressed (and soaking wet). I think my two companions for the day, Dean and Julie, were a little taken aback with quite how geeky and excited i got by it all, but they both said the found it interesting too so I am not quite mad. However, I now have a million questions for Eddy and Mausi, the main ones being, how on earth did they design all these green processes?? And more importantly, does any of this ecological wonderfulness actually affect the flavour and quality of the coffee? I did ask, and was told by our guide for the day, Manuel, that it would be possible for me to come pick coffee there when the harvest begins properly in a week or so. I’m not entirely sure if he was taking me seriously, however. I have every intention of going back up there on Monday though, so we shall see!

 

Mosquitophobia

I have been “away” for 6 days now. It feels like a life time! Little things, Nanowrimo, RASC, phone bills keep reminding me of my other life, but all that feels so far away already.

The coffee conference in Ohio was fantastic – really really interesting, and I met so many fascinating people and useful contacts – though I hate to think of them like that. A few academics whose papers I´ve read, but who actually exist in the real world! Shock horror! There were representatives from the SCAA and Cup of Excellence awards, who I had big issues with, which are too long and complex to go in to on here, although I have the beginnings of an academic paper on the topic of quality and who exactly it is who is creating the market for speciality coffees. It is not who you might think. Anyway, I made myself infamous by standing up as asking “Why not let people drink crap coffee if that is what they want?”

I never did get a straight answer to that, but several people congratulated me on asking it in the first place. One of the most vocal in the complimenting was a guy from the University of Guelph in Toronto, Stuart McCook who presentated a fantastic paper about robusta coffee and how it basically doesn’t exist in coffee discourse or history. A very good point, thinking about it – which sends me off on a whole new train of thought about whether my own project should focus specifically on “speciality” coffee, (whatever that actually means) or whether to just talk about coffee in general, allowing me to include robustas. Stuart asked me to keep an ear to the ground on my fieldwork to see if robusta is being grown in Nicaragua or Costa Rica. Costa Rica actually passed a law making it illegal to grow robusta, but it wouldn´t surprise me if it still is in some areas.

There were also talks from farmers themselves which was really useful as well. One of the best things about the conference was that it wasn´t entirely academic, there were industry people there too, and it gave much more varied perspectives. Apart from Steven Topik´s paper on the history of why Americans drink coffee, and Ken David`s talk on coffee myths, (and, I guess, talks by representatives from the World Bank, Transfair and the Rainforest Alliance) it concentrated entirely on the farmers and actually growing the stuff. Only Jonathon Morris mentioned the retail side of things with his Cappuccino Conquests paper. I did find myself bouncing up and down wanting to do a presentation myself just to fill the gap! Strangely enough i didn´t get the opportunity, but it does go to show that I was wrong to be intimidated! They were a very friendly bunch really.

I am now a few thousand miles further south in ludicrously hot Nicaragua. The heat (37 degrees celsius at midday in Granada) does nothing to help my brain function academically. The mind, quite literally, boggled at the thought of actually doing work during the day, and all I could do was flop about, sweat and scratch my numerous mosquito bites. This does not a productive Bel make. I am, however, renewing my status as “almuerza” (lunch) for the various insects here. In Managua, there were giant ants carrying seeds about the place industriously. I don{t know if they bit me, but certainly something did. In Granada there is just the usual array of annoying flying things.

Managua (the capital) was irritating as usual – too hot, noisy, dirty and for me on my own, impossible. I couldn{t walk about on my own because it was too dangerous, and taxis automatically charged me double for being foreign. Plus there is a distinct limit to the number of places you´d want to visit in Managua anyway. I made my excuses to the manager of Hotel Los Felipes (my one, tranquil oasis there) and fled to Granada.

Granada was much as I remembered it, with a few major personal landmarks missing. La Fabrica, my favourite bar in the whole world, closed dowm. This is not surprising really since I never knew how that place made money anyway. Hospedaje Central has also changed, gotten smaller and has now become Nueva Central. This is because the original owner, Bill, actually died a few years ago. That really was a shock to me, made me realise how long it´s been.

Sadly too, when I found Donna finally, she told me that Cafe Chavalos has also closed, mainly because the kids who worked there were stealing money from their own organisation, and Donna grew tired of footing the bill. That is a big shame, I had high hopes and a lot of respect for that project.

Donna is still inimitably Donna. As soon as we met, she whisked me off to an election party! The entire US ex-pat community gathered in a small bar t cheer on Obama. Absolutely fascinating, I got so caught up in the mood that I even started to get nervous as well, even though I can{t vote and don´t actually understand the system. Anyway, the good guy won, we all had too many drinks, and that result made a lot of Nicaraguans happy as well. The local paper insisted that McCain had previous dealings with the Contras, 30 years ago, so a Republican win could have had serious repercussions in Nicaragua too!

Yesterday, I finally started work-work… and now my interweb time has expired, so that will wait for another time..

 

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!

 

Some personal headaches.

Most of this stuff is quite academic and preachy – my personal thoughts either stay personal or end up on my 100words or find their way on to Crackbook.com (highly addictive and brings on the illusion of being sociable when all you are doing is virtually poking your ex and providing copy for media scares about identity theft)
I am not in the mood for more essay writing, and I’m not sure what I would write at the moment anyway. I am slowly compiling a huge list of Worries, getting myself all wound up about what the next few months will hold, and wondering whether I am doing the right thing at all. I am just starting my second year of this PhD – that alone is a terrifying thought. The last year has gone so quickly, and I honestly do not feel prepared at all for Year 2 – which is fieldwork, fieldwork and more fieldwork, collecting my own real data and not just reading other people’s ideas. I don’t feel confident enough in my project or happy enough with the work I’ve done so far to be ready for this.

Take for example, these focus groups. The teenagers were fun, there were a few useful points to be drawn out of it, but for the most part, they were pretty silly. So, I did another group with Sheffield students, hoping that they would come out to support me because they share my suffering and probably have to do similar research themselves – and would also take it seriously enough for something useful to come out of it. That is not what happened. For a start, I ended up with a group to two – one took it seriously but for various reasons, couldn’t answer a lot of my questions. The other took it seriously in his own inimitable way, shall we say, which wasn’t actually the most helpful:

Bel: Do you go to coffee shops with groups of friends then?

I go to coffee shops with my Dear Friend. She’s my Friend. She’s called S—–. We have coffee mornings. And we air our… well, you know, we just, have heart to heart chats, we are on a very deep spiritual and profound level. Meaningful conversation. You know, putting the world to rights. She’s a woman of the world, you see. And I’m a man of the world. We just kind of like, amongst the sea of kids, we just found each other. She knows the crack, she knows how the world..how it goes down. So do I. So we tend to break bread. Usually Thursday or Wednesday mornings. It’ll probably happen… what day is it, is it Thursday tomorrow?

Bel: Yeah it is.

Oh, there’s one due then. It’s on the horizon.

Bel: So,when you’re not with S——…

She’s my Friend.

Bel: Riiight.

I’m sorry, continue, continue…

The transcription of this interview took over three hours, and covers 12 full pages. Of this, I’d say about 200 words are actually on topic and useful. I have another two to do over the next fortnight. I am NOT looking forward to them AT ALL. That aside, I really am worried about not being able to get the information I need from these groups. It was pointed out both directly and inferred from that interview, that your average coffee drinker does not think about it in the same way I do. Whereas that is a fairly obvious point, I feel like I am not doing a great job of explaining this project to others, and how can I get useful data when people don’t understand what I’m asking them?

And then, I’m off on my journeys, and this is frighteningly close now. I’ve got all my flights booked, someone at Jubilee House Community (the coffee exporters) in Nicaragua emailed me with a phone number, saying “ring when you get here”. Which is suitably ad-hoc. I leave on the 30th October, but not directly to Nicaragua. On route I am going to:
A Conference on the Moral, Economic, and Social Life of Coffee

This is at Miami University in Ohio. This is the first big academic conference I’ve been to, certainly the first international one. And there will no doubt be loads of people – academics and industry professionals – who no doubt have a far better grasp of what they are talking about than I do, and I will sit in the corner terrified my own ignorance will be exposed at any time.

After that, I am flying to Managua via Houston, and ending up in Nicaragua’s capital late in the evening and with no idea of where to go when I get there. The plan is to go to Granada for a few days, see Donna and the kids and get myself acclimatised before looking up the JHC. But after that, who knows? After spending two months in Nicaragua collecting as much information about coffee waste and quality as I can, by whatever means I can, I am traveling overland to Costa Rica, where I will have to do exactly the same thing only on a much bigger plantation, where I have even more tenuous contacts to chase up.
Saying it is all a little scary is an understatement.

And then there is my even more personal concerns – leaving Carl for so long, even leaving the nice comfy safety net of university and my friends there. I have done this sort of thing before, I spent six months living with a wonderful family in Peru when I was just eighteen. When I was 20, I went to Nicaragua – twice, on a whim. I don’t remember either of these trips causing me this much anxiety. I’m hoping that this self-preservation, and marriage preservation instinct that is kicking in, is a sign of maturity. I know now that I am not invincible, and that is more scary than anything – I am thinking up more and more things to worry about.

But at the same time, it is amazingly exciting. Although I’ve never had any fixed idea on what I want to do with myself specifically, I’ve always wanted a job that would allow me to travel. Now I’ve got one, and I do love it – I am so lucky to have this opportunity. As nervous as I am, I wouldn’t change this for the world. After all, who is really going to complain about having to spend two months living here?

(Granada – Nicaragua. Thank you to Donna for the gorgeous photos!)