Barista Magazine

AUG-SEP 2013

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DOMINICAN REPUBLIC a chocolate in his hand before nap time. You see, permanent shade takes years to grow, and bananas take months. I'm so friggin' slow it took me four years to figure this out. I wouldn't allow Antonio to plant more banana trees. I agreed (with a huff) that he could leave the ones that were there. It was at year four that I noticed that under banana trees there were almost no weeds and the coffee looked great. Duh. Two years ago I saw the light and told Antonio to fill the farm with bananas. You are probably thinking I can sell them and give them away. Wrong. The transport cost of the bananas is equal to the market cost. Equal. The farm is remote—a 30-minute hike from the farm to the road. From there the trucks leave once a day to "market," which is two hours away. By the time the bananas arrive they have been mashed. As for giving them away as food: nope. That doesn't work either. Bananas are one crop that grows like a weed in Los Fríos. You have to try to kill them—and when you do they come back, unless you dig up the root. And if you give neighbors (like the jerk to the south) access to take the bananas one day, he might harvest your coffee for himself the next. Well, at least I've done some things right, right? Well, no, not from my book. We have replanted the entire farm with coffee at least twice as I remember. The first year we planted a ton of coffee all over. The lack of shade from bananas and a dry spell killed some of it. Then what really killed it? The cleanings. I decided to start things organically because I thought chemicals were bad. I told the workers to go though and watch for the planted coffee as they cleaned. The weeds would grow higher than the little coffee plants in a matter of weeks. The most careful machete-swinging worker would chop at least a couple coffee saplings a day. Hell, I did the 26 barista magazine Evening mist sets in on the Cordillera Central of the Dominican Republic. This is the hike up from Finca La Paz to Los Fríos. same when cleaning with a machete. Multiply that by three to four cleanings a year, and boom: no more coffee saplings. After working as a coffee buyer for a U.S. roaster for a few years, I started to see some patterns. When farms are planted in an organized fashion, fertilized, and pruned, they have amazing production. But production isn't everything. I told Antonio to plant the entire farm three times with Typica (the least productive variety on the island). I care about quality, but I also care about sustainability. It only took me five years to actually cup my varieties separately—Typica, Yellow Catuaí, and Red Caturra— with the sales team at Dallis Bros., for whom I was the green buyer at the time. We cupped each variety, and they all displayed different profiles. Typica: big, simple, sweet with a great body. Caturra: some red fruit notes with a really nice savory balance. Catuaí: a pointed tartaric acidity and not a ton more. The blend was the table winner, so 50/25/25 is the percent breakdown I'm now planting on the farm, respectively. Catuaí harvests late, and later is better (it's less rainy). Caturra because it is delicious and productive. Typica, well, because I believe in it. I don't hide the fact that my farm, Finca La Paz, isn't profitable. But I do try to change that. We've planted lots of yucca (with some recent earthquakes it all went bitter, according to Antonio). We built a structure for chayote, but they attracted some worms and wouldn't grow, so we planted passion fruit in the same spot (it won't grow either). Then we planted taro root, and it all mysteriously died after it grew big. When I visited the farm as a Peace Corps volunteer (long before I knew coffee and even dreamed of owning it), the owner

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