Reblogging this from coffeebyproxy – another coffee blog by fellow coffee anthropologist, Kate in Colorado. I am going to add my bits as soon as I have time (gulp!), but if you are linguistically gift coffee lover, then please feel free to contribute!
The Great Coffee Dictionary Project.
I meant to post this the other day for Earth Day, or better yet, a few weeks ago after Earth Hour at the end of March. Of course, everyone turned out their lights at the allotted time then, so the planet has been rescued and we can all breathe a sigh of relief as we all get back in our cars and switch our screens on again….
Excuse the sarcasm. I just don’t get Earth Day. Isn’t every day Earth Day? It’s not like we go anywhere else often, is it?
I am on a bit of a Green coffee kick nowadays, however. I don’t mean Green coffee as in, raw coffee, although I do have some large sacks of that in the basement at the moment. Nor do I mean the likes of Nescafe Green Blend. Despite that still being the most commented on post on this blog, I haven’t actually seen many anti-oxident filled, weight-loss marketed, gimicky and green-washed coffee products in quite a while. Maybe they haven’t reached Canada yet. This is a very good thing.
What I mean this time, is environmentally-friendly coffee, if that isn’t an oxymoron. I’ve already written a great deal about organic and/or sustainably produced coffee, and there are very many issues with it. In brief, organic coffee is far more difficult and more risky for impoverished farmers to grow – sometimes is it not worth the investment of time, labour and resources to grow a crop that may well be eaten by pests before it can be harvested. Then there are the high-end buyers who refuse to buy organic coffee under the impression that using chemical fertilizers optimises the quality of the beans….
Of course, the farmer-friendly alternative involves cutting down the cloudforests and destroying the biodiversity in the tropics, just to grow a cash crop.
In summary then, it is very very difficult to grown coffee in an environmentally-friendly way. But given that millions of people’s livelihoods depend on those crops, can we not just consume it better?
I am trying to do my bit. My last post was ranting and raving about how wasteful Keurig k-cups and other coffee pods are. Getting rid of them would be a start. I am soon going to launch the first ‘green’, trike-drawn coffee cart in Regina (not actually green, more, PURPLE) – it’ll be the only food truck downtown that doesn’t have an engine too.
I am also selling reusable travel mugs, and CupCuffs – very stylish, reusable sleeves for your takeaway coffees that don’t involve cutting down trees to make cardboard disposable ones. (FYI, they’re made in Canada too, not sewn by small Korean children and shipped around the world).
I also saw this the other day:
http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/citi-bike-coffee-program-launches-dumbo-article-1.1764063
I’d love to see that in Regina – it may be a while yet though…
Recent studies claiming that arabica coffee could be wiped out by climate change in as little as 80 years were widely reported, but the one that stuck with me most poignantly was this:
Mainly because it highlights the devastation in my beloved Nicaragua. I can as flippant as I like about Earth Hour and associated first-world hand-wringing, but this – this is serious.
So what can we do? Not stop drinking the coffee. Stopping drinking coffee just makes it worse – the farmers still have to sell it to someone! The whole globalised market is not suddenly going to disappear over night, no matter how much I dislike Starbucks/Nestle/Keurig/insert-latest-fashionable-boycott-here. Instead, do as the farmers tell us:
Coffee picker Myra Carmen Chavarría in Atuna Uno was amazed when I told her that I spent £2 or more every day on a cappuccino. “If you love coffee in your country that much, you need to help us survive to grow it for you!”
Simple really: pay more for it, or lose it. Paying a higher price for coffee won’t cure climate change, but it will certainly help the farmers cope with that climate change better. Or, start learning to love Robusta coffee that is more resilient to climate change and disease – and tastes far worse.
Look! I dressed up and everything!
I was recently invited to speak at the Engineers Without Borders fundraising Gala at the Royal Saskatchewan Hotel. This was a little intimidating: very posh hotel, 150 people all in formal dress, paying a lot of money to hear me waffle on…. and me knowing very little about engineering! They knew I was the Official Local Coffee Geek though, so somehow I had to link coffee knowledge to engineers, along the general theme of “Building the Future”. This is what I came up with!
(Be warned, I had to speak for 20 minutes. Long Post Klaxon!)
What has coffee got to do with Engineering?
Well, the coffee was the first commodity and food industry to become Fairtrade certified. The Fairtrade Foundation was set up to help farmers who were living in poverty as a result of the crash in the global prices of coffee. The Fairtrade movement guarantees a minimum price for farmers to help stabilize the industry and to guarantee at least a minimum income from the crop of coffee. Furthermore, when international coffee buyers negotiate a contract under the Fairtrade scheme, they agree to pay not only a fair price for the coffee, but also an additional ‘social premium’ – around 10cents per pound of coffee. This social premium goes to the coffee cooperatives, and is used to fund projects that benefit the coffee farming community a whole. These projects can be anything from building schools for the local children, or irrigation and clean water projects to investing in new coffee processing technology at the cooperative’s coffee mill. This is where engineers and development workers are crucial to the coffee communities. Fairtrade schemes just provide the money, they don’t often get involved in the actual building!
I am going to talk about coffee farming in Nicaragua because this is where I did a lot of my own fieldwork. Nicaragua is a developing country, and nearly a third of its GDP comes from its coffee industry. The vast amajority of Nicaraguan coffee farms are less than 3 hectares in size, and are also located in remote, hard to reach areas. High quality coffee needs high altitude – over 800metres above sea level, and a very humid, warm climate and very fertile soil. Some regions of Nicaragua in the Northern highlands, in the cloudforests and on the side of volcanoes provide near-perfect coffee-growing conditions. A great deal of Nicaraguan coffee is grown organically too, in an effort to preserve the cloudforest biodiversity, so the coffee plants are grown in amongst other plants and trees, with no chemical fertilizers or pesticides used. This technique means the coffee tastes great and fetches higher prices for the farmers, but it also creates a great many infrastructure problems.
Small coffee farms are generally grouped together into cooperatives, in fact, the Fairtrade Foundation insists on them, and only gives Fairtrade Certification status to recognised, democratically based cooperatives. The cooperatives process the coffee from hundreds, sometimes thousands of farms. The coffee production process is very complex – it’s not just a case of picking it off the tree and roasting it. The farmers pick the coffee by hand, then depulp it, (meaning, take the fruit off it) on their own farm, meaning that each farmer has to have their own depulper machine (either handcranked or diesel powered). The coffee beans are then washed to remove the sticky fruit muscelage. The coffee beans then have to be dried out so that they lose at least 10% of their moisture, before they are transported to the central processing mills operated by the cooperative. At the processing mill, the coffee is “trilled” in a huge machine which essentially removes the now-brittle parchment like layer covering the beans. Then they are dried out further, spread out on huge concrete patios in the sun and turned regularly, and finally they are meticulously sorted to remove low quality, defective beans, first by hand, then by a very clever complicated machine, which detects the beans’ weigh, size, shape, density, and colour, and grades the crop accordingly. Only then can it be sold to international buyers.
In recent years, the coffee commodity price has recovered well, and the price of it on the global markets has far exceeded the Fairtrade guaranteed minimum. But to get the very best prices, farmers have to produce the very best quality coffee – and customers are getting more and more discerning. The quality can be affected by any number of climatic and environmental factors, and much like wine, there are good and bad years for coffee, and variations between coffee grown in Nicaragua and coffee grown in Ethiopia, for instance. Some variation in quality can be controlled by the farmers, and their skills and most significantly, the access they have to some resources has a huge bearing on the coffee’s quality. This is where the Fairtrade social premium comes in.
In order to preserve the coffee’s quality, certain parts of the production process have to be performed within certain time frames. On the farm, the fruit has to be removed from the beans within 24 hours, otherwise it can start to ferment, which damages the flavour of the coffee. Similarly, the beans must be transported to the cooperative’s processing mill as soon as possible, so that the beans can be dried out quickly and farmers can minimize the risk of damage from unexpected rain or from pests whilst the coffee is on the farm.
Transporting coffee to the cooperative processing mill is not as simple as it sounds. As mentioned previously, the farms are usually halfway up mountains and in tropical cloudforests. In many parts of Nicaragua, irrigations is a huge problem too: in winter, it is too dry and the ground cracks or turns to sand, and landslides are common. In summer, areas can flood and roads can be cut off entirely by mudslides. If there are actual roads, they are usually unpaved, steep and tightly curled around the mountains, and can be virtually impassable without a large and powerful 4×4 vehicle – which are well beyond the budgets of the farmers. With hundreds of farms spread out over large areas, the cooperative cannot practically manage coffee collections themselves, so the farmers have to transport their coffee by their own means. I did see one farmer negotiating a steep mountain track with a 100lb sack of coffee beans strapped to the back of his little 125cc motorbike, but otherwise, they are forced to use the rural bus service, that is, very old yellow school buses donated from the United States, which serve as the only form of public transport. As you can imagine, neither is a particularly ideal option, but the risk of damaging the coffee crop – that often represents the entire annual income for the farming families – is too great, and so they always find a way!
Another big issue in Nicaraguan coffee regions is that of water pollution. Washing the sticky fruit mucilage off coffee beans on the farms requires a source of clean running water, and quite a lot of it too. Whereas most farmers do have access to this at least, supplies are still limited and washing the coffee has its own set of problems.
In neighbouring Costa Rica, farmers are required by law to purify and reuse water on coffee farms, which is far easier to achieve when Costa Rican farmers have the resources to purify water already installed on the farms. In Nicaragua however, farmers cannot afford this sort of technology, and the cooperatives are not in a position to implement it either. Water containing coffee mucilage is extremely acidic, and if it is left to just run off the farms and soak into the earth, it can strip important nutrients from the soil, which potentially damages the following year’s crop, as well as any other plants in the vicinity. In the worst case scenario, run-off water can enter the water table and exacerbate existing flooding, and also enter the water supply intended for human consumption.
Maintaining and enhancing coffee’s quality is paramount to the farmers’ livelihoods, as the best, most sustainable prices are paid for the highest quality coffee. However, the quality of the crop depends a great deal on the farmer’s ability to manage the logistics of processing coffee beans, and on his access to resources and technology.
The Fairtrade social premium paid to the cooperatives provides the financial resources to aid the farmers’ often precarious situation, but in practical terms, a lot of the work needs to be developed by skilled, knowledgeable engineers. If farmers cannot afford 4×4 trucks, then mountain roads must be improved and maintained so that transporting coffee is made easier and more efficient. To avoid pollution, irrigation needs to be properly managed and developed, and the farmers must be provided with the technology (and technical know-how) to purify and reuse their water supplies. None of these problems are insurmountable but they do require the help of skilled infrastructure experts, and most importantly, engineers who actually understand the coffee industry, and who can see what needs to be done to help the farmers and to improve the quality of the coffee we all take for granted.
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!
“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
Por Annabel y Carl Townsend, Universidad de Sheffield, Reinos Unidos.
Nuevas investigaciones en la Universidad de Sheffield, Reinos Unidos, muestran que pueden extraer aceite de los granos de café perdidos para ser usados como biodiesel para automóviles y otras maquinarias.
La investigación está basada en una práctica en Nicaragua, y sigue la investigación científica de la Universidad de Nevada-Reno, quien anuncio en el 2008 que habían descubierto que el aceite extraído de granos de café antes usados o restos del mismo (chingaste) pueden ser reusados para hacer una nueva forma de biodiesel. La investigación de Sheffield muestra que el aceite de café puede ser directamente extraído en grandes cantidades a partir del grano de café fallado que crece en Latino América cada año.
Esta investigación podría tener futuras implicaciones y consecuencias para la industria, y también podría ser potencialmente mejorada las vidas de cafetaleros y pequeños productores de café en Centro América. Cada año, una significante proporción de la cosecha del café no puede ser exportada porque no tiene la calidad estándar demandada por los mercados internacionales. Este café defectivo y de tercero calidad posee mas aceite que el café de alta calidad, por lo tanto es ideal para la producción de aceite como biodiesel.
Vendiendo este café que se convierte en combustible y no en bebida (lo que demanda bajos precios para los productores) tendría mejor uso como aceite, de otra manera este café de baja calidad estaría en la basura, y a la vez proveería un potencial recurso sostenible de biodiesel. También, seria un proveedor barato de recursos de energía natural para los mismos productores de café.
Adicionalmente, separando una parte de este café de la cosecha requeriría menos tierra, ya que aceite de café proviene del granos no util, entonces no necesitas plantar mas café por este aceite, (como la soya, que necesita de diferentes plantaciones para sus diversos usos) evitando algunas de las mas controversiales dificultades alrededor de la industria del biodiesel.
Si esa nueva energía potencial puede ser producida comercialmente, podríamos muy pronto llenar los tanques de los carros así como nosotros mismos con una taza de café por la mañana.
(¡¡Muchisimos gracias a Diana y Jasmina por sus ayudar con mi gramatica!!)
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 large part of this project is about ideas of coffee quality, and some of the best coffees in the world are produced here in Nicaragua. Professional cuppers from the Speciality Association of America rate Nicaraguan, organic, shade and altitude grown coffees well into the 90s on their cupping scale. There is no shortage of the stuff either. Bernabe’s coffee from his little farm in La Corona averages at 85 points during the cupping tests at Cecocafen (the cooperative that has its own cupping laboratory). I spent the weekend at Finca Esperanza Verde, whose 15 manzanas of coffee also goes to Cecocafen, where is has won countless awards, including one to say that coffee typifies the flavours of the region – this is truly terroir coffee, held in as much esteem as champagne is in France. And the farmers are very proud of their crops.
But at present, I do not know enough about cupping to judge quality for myself. I just have to take their word for it – which I am loathe to do, especially when it comes to the SCAA. So, how do I ‘study’ quality? One way of truly knowing something, understanding it properly, is to look at it’s opposite. So, today I am concentrating on utterly crap coffees. Even though I am in the heart of the coffee lands, finding crap coffee was actually a lot easier than expected.
On the breakfast table
When I first arrived in Matagalpa and met my new landlady, Emma, I told her I was here to study coffee. This she took to heart, and for my first breakfast in the house, I was greeted with a large jar of Nescafe ‘Clasico’ – instant coffee. Emma was oddly proud of this, and I found out later that it was a special gift, she was showing off. Nescafe Instant is very expensive here, more so, infact than the exceedingly good quality, freshly ground stuff! I went round the supermarket this morning, and sure enough, all the varieties of coffee were piled up together. 100g jar Nescafe Clasico Cafe Soluble= 69 cordobas (just over £2). 1lb bag of ‘export quality’ Matagalpan ground coffee= 34 cordobas. Half the price!
There is also “Cafe Presto” which I reluctantly bought a foil packet of, (for research purposes only, you understand!). Cafe Presto is another brand of instant coffee, but is entirely Nicaraguan – grown, produced and marketed here. On the back, in Spanish and translated into rather bizarre English, it says “Our coffee is harvested in high grounds where the climate and the special care cause the grains of coffee that we select to prepare our Presto Instant Coffee.” Underneath that it helpfully informs me that it contains “100% coffee”. Useful. The slogan screams “¡Reanimando Nicaragua!” (reanimating Nicaragua) – but the people pictured enjoying this stuff on the packet do not look very animated, or even Nicaraguan for that matter.
The offending item
Racial undertones aside, my main question concerning Presto is just – what on earth is in it? Surely they can’t be using their fantastic quality organic arabica to make instant crap? And if they are, WHY? Is there really such a demand for instant coffee here that they will use their precious speciality crops to produce it? If so, why do they then sell instant coffee at prices too expensive for the average Nicaraguan to afford? Instant coffee as a luxury item is a very new and strange concept for me. Another comparison with the wine industry – this is like going to Italy and finding that they are all lusting after Blue Nun!!
It could of course be robusta coffee. They do grow some robusta in Nicaragua. So far all the farmers I’ve spoken to say there is some, but of course, they don’t grow it themselves, their neighbours might though… It is not something you casually admit to. Javiar at Finca Esperanza Verde said there was no need to grow robusta on that farm, because they had the altitude (1300m above sea level) and climate to grow arabica. Robusta, as the name suggests, is more robust, it can survive lower temperatures and with more rain, and also grows at lower altitudes. Robusta is for coffee farmers who haven’t got the geography. (“like in Costa Rica” as several people have said, always somewhat smugly).
Cecocafen, being a FairTrade certified cooperative, also accept what they call “cafe convencional” – non organic, lower quality stuff, and pay the fair trade rate for it. Bernabe at La Corona prefers to grow the highest quality he can, because it commands a price considerably higher than the fair trade rate. But if something goes wrong, he knows Cecocafen provide the safety net and he can still sell the lower quality beans there. This, he says, is the main reason why “his neighbours” grow robusta. It is a fail-safe. Robusta crops are far less likely to fail. and they are easier to grow in the first place. Some of the farmers, particularly in that area (which is at 800m, considerably lower than Esperanza Verde) grow both varieties of coffee, “just in case.” Robusta trees are usually a bit taller than arabica, and so the robusta can also be used to shade the quality crop.
So, this all suggests that there is opportunity, incentive, market and seemingly a demand for crap coffee in Nicaragua. But as ever, there is also almost a sense of shame, of taboo. And maybe even a sense of ´waste´if I can construct this concept coherantly. Crap coffee definitely exists here, but no-one really wants to talk about it. They all much prefer to tell me about their quality – which is just as useful in the long run!!
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!
Spilling the Beans (Research Journal) 