Serving People Serving Coffee Since 2005
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for other opportunities to supplement their income, such as ecotour- ism. Hacienda San Pedro, for example, has a café and restaurant at the farm and three rental cabins for guests. Returning to her family's farm after her stint in pharmaceuticals, Rebecca quickly took over marketing, sales, and distribution. "I remem- ber filling my car with lots of coffee boxes, and going personally to do the delivery to the shops, in Old San Juan, at the airport, restaurants, wherever," she says. "It was hard because I was by myself doing every- thing." It also meant she lived and worked in San Juan, away from the farm except on weekends, but all of the effort eventually proved worthwhile. "Those days were hard, but at the end I realized that sell- ing something that is produced by your family, with the help of many Puerto Ricans, is priceless. And it doesn't matter the difficulties and the obstacles when at the end, the reward is good." Seven years ago, Rebecca opened the first Hacienda San Pedro café in San Juan. "The coffee shop started as a necessity more than a dream," she says, "But with time it became a dream." The café is situ- ated in a lively part of the city known for its vibrant art scene. "People can enjoy the coffee in a nice environment, and we have sandwiches and local desserts made by small local companies. Orange juice is fresh squeezed, direct from the farm. To go inside this one is a com- plete experience, like a piece of the farm in the city." The second location launched five years ago, and is inside the ground floor of a large and bustling bank. Rebecca describes it as "more informal because people buy the coffee to-go." As a mother of two, Rebecca often has her hands full keeping up with all of it, but she does sometimes find time to work behind the bar. "I visit the shops daily, and sometimes I cover some shifts, but I run mostly from one shop to the another," says Rebecca. "I can't be more proud of the results. It has been lots of years of hard work but the rewards are defi- nitely there." While all of her work with the farm and cafés is certainly enough to fill her time, Rebecca has recently started working even more in her role as president of Barista & Farmer. A few years ago, after Francesco wrote her via Facebook to say he'd used Hacienda San Pedro's coffee to win the Italian Barista Championship, Rebecca and Francesco became friends. Eventually, he traveled to Puerto Rico to visit. "I took him to the farm," she says, "And we showed him our jobs and our daily life. On our way back to the city, he told me, 'Rebecca, I want to share this knowledge with baristas. I want them to understand and learn all I have learned from you.' This was exactly the moment where Barista & Farmer was born." Rebecca says that the main goal of the program is education. It started "with an idea of building an event that can let us have the opportunity to share with the baristas the real life on the farm. Let them learn, touch the plants, pick the coffee, live the life of the farmer in a real farm: where they eat the same food, are bitten by mosquitos, feel the heat, the rain, and they share it all with the pickers, and the families, and understand the importance beyond the cup of coffee. Simply like this, we started the project. This was just an idea. We didn't realize that something great would happen later. "As soon as Francesco told me the idea, I started thinking that it was true—that we [farmers] needed to spread the message that coffee is not just a nice cup, coffee is deeper than this, and one of the ways of telling the story was through the event. [At Barista & Farmer], we want to let the participants know how life is inside the coffee farm. It's an experience to get to see the coffee in a different way. I know in one week it's hard to see everything, but I am sure one week can change and fill the minds of lots of people." Each morning during Barista & Farmer, the participants rise before the sun to join local pickers in the coffee fields. At lunchtime, they bring their sacks of coffee in to be weighed, and then the afternoons are spent at the Barista Academy, where they take classes on all aspects of coffee production and service. "We have an amazing team working in the event," Rebecca says, "like Alberto Polojac, Andrej Godina, and Scott Conary among others." The first Barista & Farmer went from idea to execution in less than six months. "I said yes without even asking my dad," she says. In June, Francesco told Rebecca he was bringing eight baristas to her farm that November. It quickly bloomed to 10, then 12, then 15 baristas. The number seemed overwhelming to Rebecca. "'How we will under- stand each other?' I thought," she recalls. "It's a different culture, lan- guage, all is different between us, and we can manage 10, but 15 is too much—what I'm going to do? "I still remember the feeling of receiving on our farm the 15 Italian baristas," she says. In that first year, all the participants in Barista & Farmer were Italian, but in the years to follow, Francesco and Rebecca have opened the program to baristas from around the world. "They arrived in Jayuya after a superlong trip from many places in Italy. In this precise moment, I didn't have any expectations, and I didn't have clear- ly in my mind what would happen next. We just worked hard on our mission, no matter the difficulties, and I am very proud and satisfied with the results. After a week sharing every day with them, I can say it was one of the nicest weeks on the farm." It was only the beginning for Barista & Farmer. "What we started as a trial brought us incredible results," she says. "Right after we finished, we were having conversations with the people from Honduras [about the next year's Barista & Farmer event]. In that moment, we under- stood that the event has lots of possibilities." In February of 2015, the second Barista & Farmer was held in Copán, Honduras, with a few tweaks to the original vision. Instead of 15 baristas, they went down to 10, which then grew to 12. "We choose " Every time a barista touches a coffee tree, something changes in the way they see the coffee. " 54 barista magazine