Barista Magazine

JUN-JUL 2012

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GUATEMALA & EL SALVADOR BY SARAH MYKKANEN I am a barista. Not a café owner, nor a green buyer, nor a roaster—just a barista. I work with coffee everyday, with my hands. I get to know all the characteristics of different coffees, how to dance with them and bring out the best qualities. I have always wanted to see the other side of the industry, this mysterious place called origin. So I saved my tips and bought a ticket. I went independently, with just my backpack and a few email addresses of producers scribbled in a notebook. Ten or so farms in two-and-a-half months. Now, I look back on what was something of a coffee pilgrimage. What I discovered completely changed my perspective about origin trips, direct trade, and what constitutes a quality coffee. The day I left for the airport in mid-January, I made myself one last AeroPress of Heart coffee, the Guatemala Puerta Verde. I flew into Guatemala City, and a week later I was touring the Puerta Verde farm near Antigua. After some beach time in a surfer town called El Tunco, I met up with Brandon Smyth, who roasts coffee for Water Avenue in Portland. Together we visited the Manzano and Menendez farms in El Salvador. I traveled on my own for awhile, then found my way to a small, fair trade, organic cooperative run by ex-guerillas from the civil war in Guatemala. I met up with Wille Yli-Luoma, owner and head roaster at Heart Roasters, who was on a sourcing trip with an importer. We traveled all over Guatemala and El Salvador visiting farms. The more I traveled, the more I realized how much work goes into bringing coffee from the farm to the roastery, and finally into my hands. I also began to ask more questions about direct trade. Even though the specialty market is niche, our industry is vast. I experienced firsthand the effects of dealing with big business in an easily corruptible developing nation, where businessmen travel with heat-packing bodyguards. I also spent time at the other end of the spectrum, working at a small cooperative that is trying to learn about different processing techniques and exporting policies. From hitchhiking up a mountain, to being flown to farms in a private plane, and wined and dined by an importer, I definitely had an adventure and learned an amazing amount about our industry. Direct trade is a commonly used term in our industry, but is vague enough to have multiple meanings. Does going direct mean that you meet the farmer, see his farm, snap a few photos, and then buy his coffee from an importer? Does it mean that you pay money directly to the producer, but don't know how much the workers make? One night I was sitting around a bonfire at Emilio Lopez Diaz's farm, Finca Manzano in El Salvador. I was with Brandon and some other roasters and coffee nerds, playing ditties 26 barista magazine on the guitar and sharing stories. Brandon said he liked one of the pulp naturals he had the year before. A half hour later, when a truck came in with the day's crop from that same lot, Brandon said he wanted some of it processed as a pulp natural. Emilio said, "Cool, we can do that. " We headed over to the mill, beers in hand, to watch the coffee being unloaded, going through the depulper, bypassing the de-mulcifier, and starting to be spread out on the patios. We went back to the fire, and Brandon was grinning, I looked up at the stars, saw the nebulae in Orion, and tried to wrap my head around what had just happened. When we woke up the next morning, mist was hanging in the tree on the skyline, and the coffee from the night before, Brandon's coffee, was glistening on the patios, its sticky sweet smell in the air. Emilio was asking all kinds of questions about coffee, and conducting experiments to find the answers. "Does natural processing mask unique characteristics of individual varietals, or does it add something else to the flavor profiles?" he inquired. He had us try an SL-28, a Red Bourbon, a Yellow Bourbon, and a Pacamara which were all planted on the same day, at the same elevation, and grown under the same conditions. We did a blind cupping of these four coffees processed as fully washed and also as fully natural. We instantly identified some of the cups. But it was interesting that we couldn't tell if some of the other coffees were naturally processed or if they were just an intense Pacamara or SL-28 . Even though technically he was selling coffee, it all seemed secondary to the general coffee inquiry we were sharing. It was coffee nerds nerding out together. This is direct trade. I also had a really great time at the Menendez and Pacas family farms. Miguel and Guierremo Menendez' mom made us pupusas one night, and all of us—barista, roaster, engineer, farmers, producers—sat around the table and talked about coffee for hours. Miguel Sr. drove us up to the 1700- meter Las Delicias Pacamara lot, where you could see volcanoes and the Guatemalan and Honduran borders. The coffee trees were remarkably tall, at least twice my height! We went hiking through Las Delicias, half sliding down the mountain because it was so steep, giggling and running into trees to break our fall. The Pacas family is really in touch with its history. They are solid in their values, and genuinely interested in the people to whom they sell coffee. The farmers I spent time with in El Salvador are conducting what I feel direct trade should be. They are transparent, traceable, focused on the coffee not the adventure, generous with their workers and community, and interested in where the coffee is going and how it will be represented. I noticed two types of farmers in my travels. There are the forward- FIELD REPORT GUATEMALA & EL SALVADOR JAPAN SCAA, PORTLAND, OREGON

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