Barista Magazine

JUN-JUL 2014

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42 barista magazine clean and ready to be inspected for defects, which are sorted out by hand and eye inspection. There was an air of anxiety as the head sorter picked at the 100-gram sample. The defects were then placed in a tray for all to see, and weighed. This sample came out 9 percent—again, too high! I can't have nine pounds of defects in every 100 pounds of coffee; there's no way I can make that coffee taste good enough to sell. The co-op had to make a decision. They could pay the women sorters to remove enough defects to get the coffee down to 4 percent, or they could haul the coffee back to their warehouse 20 kilometers to the north and sort out the defects themselves. At Gumutindo, the sorters are independent contractors. They sit under a giant shade tree at the mill and spend their days picking out defects, damaged bean by damaged bean. Unlike the sorters in Central and South America who sit at a conveyor belt that car- ries an endless stream of coffee beans past silent, seated women who pick passing defective beans out of the rapids, these woman socialize all day and pick at their own pace. It seems a much more civilized way to do tedious work. The co-op board members voted to hire the sorters and sent a member of the board to the tree to negotiate a price for the sort- ing. The women sat and sorted, each with her own sack to clean, knowing just how many pounds needed to be culled from each sack to get it into an acceptable range. Now we had the 2014 crop due to be shipped to the U.S.A. and arrive in May, being in the last phase before being put on a truck to travel to Mombasa, where it would be transferred to a ship headed south past Madagascar and around the Cape of Good Hope at the tip of South Africa, and head across the Atlantic to the Panama Canal and up the west side of Central America toward its destination, the Port of Oakland, where we pick it up and truck it to our warehouse in Fort Bragg, California. The Mirembe Kawomera co-op members, it turns out, can produce four containers of coffee: one from its central washing station, and three from coffee depulped and dried on the farms. Eight years ago, we realized that a central washing station was needed if the coffee quality was to improve. Farm depulping and drying on 300+ small plots was, at that time, producing a mix of flavors that bordered on wood and red clay. We helped the co-op understand the need for a centralized washing statin by financing a board trip to Rwanda where they were hosted by the Dukunde Kawa Co-op in Musas. In 2006, the PK coop- erative built a small washing station (one container per year capacity) and quality improved, as did the value of their coffee. Still, there were three containers that we could not purchase for quality reasons. On this trip, we agreed that expanding the washing station was necessary, as was their ability to dry an increased volume of coffee. Although Thanksgiving Coffee has been this amazing interfaith cooperative's storyteller for the past decade, it is time for others to spread the word. It's time for other roasters to to tell the inspi- rational story of a small group of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim coffee growers in Uganda that decided to work together, grow cof- fee organically, form a Fair Trade cooperative, and use the power of faith for economic development to show the world that peace between different faiths is possible. COOPERATIVA CAFÉ TIMOR Thanks Its International Coffee Buyers COOPERATIVA CAFÉ TIMOR is celebrating two million patients treated thanks to our international coffee buying partners who have supported our free healthcare services initiative in rural coffee farming communities for the last thirteen years. Revenues from the sale of our organic fair trade coffee and assistance from NCBA, CBI, USAID, the government of East Timor, MILK, and the COMO and Khoo Teck Paut Foundations sustain seven rural clinics, three mobile clinic teams and eleven community healthcare teams. COOPERATIVA CAFÉ TIMOR thanks you for your continued support of a healthy coffee farming community. B o o k 1 - 4 6 . i n d d 4 2 Book 1-46.indd 42 5 / 1 5 / 1 4 1 0 : 3 1 P M 5/15/14 10:31 PM

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