Barista Magazine

FEB-MAR 2015

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85 www.baristamagazine.com or diseases that attack commercial plants or crops. Farming was part of my experience, but it wasn't until 2002 that I acquired Los Lajones Estate with my father. I started cupping with Wilford Lamastus and Francisco Serracin in Boquete at SCAP 14 years ago. I was working to certify our farm organic, but also found that the quality of Los Lajones coffee was amazing. I can say that 2000 was the beginning of my shift to specialty coffee. I was visiting and working with Mario Serracin—another amaz- ing coffee science guy from Boquete—who was studying in Hawaii. It was my first learning about the Hawaiian coffee industry and their quality and marketing strategy to make Kona coffee one of the most expensive [coffees] in the world. But the real mentors in cupping and learning to appreciate coffee quality, in exotic as well as most common varietals, were my friends Willem Boot and Joseph Brodsky. Working with those two guys in Ethiopia in 2005 and 2006 was the most amazing experience ever to happen to me in my coffee life. From a talk in the middle of drinks and music at the Jazz Festival in the old part of Panama City, Willem invited me to cup with them at the second Ethiopian Specialty Coffee Competition. And three weeks later, I was in Ethiopia! One month later, I decided to work for Coffee Quality Institute as a volunteer in coffee quality harvesting. I was hooked to coffee forever, cupping every day many different coffees from different regions in Ethiopia. After that, I stayed with Joseph for more than six months cupping coffees and traveling all around until we found the first coffees that became Ninety Plus [Joseph's company] coffees: Aricha, Beloya, and Idido Misty Valley. KRO: You're a fairly rare producer in that you have personal experi- ence farming, and you've also traveled to other producing countries to study their methods, right? GC: I started farming coffee in 2003 on my own, even though I was processing my father's coffee since 2002. I have been farming in Los Lajones Estate for the last 13 years, but also developing new small farms in Boquete, and also in El Salvador. We haven't produced any washed coffee since 2007 at any of our coffee farms. This is what I teach other farmers, and how important it is to record quality at any stage of the farming and processing operations. The last 10 years in the coffee industry, I have seen a lot all around the world, from Central and South America, as well as Africa, mainly Ethiopia or Kenya. At producing countries, you see a transition into a new generation of coffee farmers with amazing contrasts from mech- anized coffee farming in Brazil or Hawaii, to family subsistence coffee farming without any technology or varietal focus, but in both cases peo- ple with a lot of love for coffee, and in both extremes fighting for survival. KRO: What would you say are some of the most important practices you've developed in coffee agriculture and processing? GC: I think being the first certified-organic coffee farm in Panama— because the organic niche was paying an average premium of 50 cents a pound on green beans—is important. Also, we knew about the good quality potential we had with Los Lajones Estate as the highest-alti- tude coffee plantation in Panama, that our first step was to export and direct trade with roasters for all our crop. I worked many years in biological controls for agriculture, building and putting together the first laboratory, to produce the fungi which are the natural enemy for control of the coffee borer; Panama was one of the last countries in the world without the pest. I travel a lot in the Caribbean, Central and South America, and Hawaii studying and doing research with this coffee pest, one of the biggest problems still. After seeing how the Ethiopians were producing sun-dried naturals in African drying beds, I decided to come back to Panama in 2004 and change our farming model at Los Lajones, focusing on organic specialty coffee without polluting. Everybody in Panama, and I'll say in the whole of Central America, in those years was producing only washed coffees, so we started to process our first honey and natural sun-dried coffees, changing the materials of the drying beds to have better efficiency and a cleaner drying process. The rest is history: Honey coffee became a new category in specialty coffee, and Central American honeys and natural coffees are receiving the best prices because of their unique quality profiles in the cup. I've been teaching and training farmers how to produce honey and natural sun-dried coffees without polluting water, saving energy, and increasing their quality controls at the harvesting and processing because that could increase the points in their coffee cup. I always try to teach what I do myself to produce the best quality possible in our own farm. We have a good amount of farmers from El Salvador using our techniques that have been winning the Cup of Excellence in the last five years, and that's a good reward for myself. KRO: What do you think are the biggest challenges facing specialty- coffee production right now? Do you think there are any big opportu- nities for coffee farmers in the future? equatorcoffees.com

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