Barista Magazine is your home for the worldwide community of coffee and the people who make it.
Issue link: http://baristamagazine.epubxp.com/i/68541
thinking progressive types like Emilio at Finca Manzano, who are pushing boundaries and experimenting with new methods for pruning, fermentation and processing. There are also more traditional (read: soulfully romantic) types, like the Menendez and Pacas families. They are reinventing the coffee practices of their ancestors by bending branches instead of pruning and digging holes around coffee plants for drainage. They leave cherries on the tree to dry and use raised drying beds that are shaded in the middle and have sliding shelves. Both types of farmers are necessary for the future of our industry. Both are legitimate and provide amazing coffees. Even with all the differences, the one thing I learned for a fact is that on every farm, El Ingeniero (the engineer) is the guy you want to talk to. These guys know every inch of the land, every animal and the status of every plant. They are in tune with the coffee. They are the personification of the coffee trees. El Ingeniero at Finca Menendez found a single plant with cherries that tasted like ripe peaches. Even though there were only four plants in the whole farm that had this peach mutation, El Ingeniero found them so that he could plant their seeds. Not only do these guys know what's up, they're also are the ones with the machetes. Before my trip, I talked a lot about "the farmer, at origin," and how we pay a high price for coffee so the money goes back to the farmer. I now realize this thinking is flawed, because there is the producer, the farmer and the workers. The producer may own the wet and/or dry mill, he may buy coffee from farmers in the area, and prepare it for export, and he is usually a farmer himself. The farmer owns fields of coffee trees, but doesn't always have the processing equipment for a wet or dry mill, or exporting capabilities, so he might sell his coffee cherries to a producer. The people picking coffee are just workers, usually migrant and living in poverty. Direct trade means buying from a producer who is open and honest about how the farmers and workers are compensated. It's buying good coffee, but from a producer who is also supporting a community. I tried talking to a bunch of workers, but most of them don't speak Spanish, but rather they spoke one of the 33 indigenous languages of Guatemala. I met an older woman at the sorting table of one of the Zelaya family farms, in Antigua, Guatemala. I tried to say hello and ask her about her day, but she shook her head and her grandson told Origin trips can sometimes be misconstrued to be more about adventure than coffee, equivalent to a trip to coffee Disneyland. I had been traveling around on my own for two months, como la gente was sort of my theme, which means 'like the people.' I was hitchhiking and riding chicken buses, trying to live closely to the people, to hear their stories and see what their lives were like, what they enjoyed and worried about. www.baristamagazine.com 27