“Coffee megagods” fly from Guatemala to Burundi
Duane Sorenson had planned to fly to Yemen, rattle up dirt roads in dusty four-by-fours and dart through the Arabian sky in prop planes as he toured the country searching for open-minded coffee growers.
Sorenson, who is the owner of Stumptown Coffee Roasters in Portland, Oregon, intended to offer the farmers more money than anyone ever had before in return for a promise to improve their crops. But a mix-up with his passport left him stuck in Washington. Disappointed but undeterred, he boarded a plane for Guatemala City instead. When he arrived, he ate tortillas, beans and tilapia with the owner of Finca El Injerto in the western Huehuetenango department, one of the most celebrated coffee farms in Central America. It was a roundabout way to go for a meal. But Sorenson and a few like-minded coffee hunters from around the United States will go almost anywhere, do almost anything and pay almost any price in pursuit of the perfect cup of coffee. For people at Stumptown and friendly competitors like Intelligentsia Coffee Roasters and Tea Traders of Chicago and Counter Culture Coffee of Durham, North Carolina, long trips to remote farms for meetings without immediate payoffs are necessary steps in a much bigger goal: reinventing the coffee business.
“These people have an almost unbelievable ability to source exquisite, unique coffees,” Mark Prince, senior editor at the coffee appreciation Web site coffeegeek.com, wrote in an e-mail.
Connie Blumhardt, publisher of the coffee magazine Roast, concurred: “They are certainly the leaders right now. Some smaller roasters just worship them, like they”re these coffee megagods.”
“Direct trade” is the most popular name of the style of business practiced by these coffee companies, known as roasters. It means, most simply, that the roasters buy their beans directly from the farms and cooperatives that grow them, not from brokers. The term was popularized by Geoff Watts, director of coffee and green coffee buyer for Intelligentsia. (Sorenson”s air miles last week paled beside those of Watts, who flew to Burundi with another coffee roaster to consult with groups who want to revive that country”s once-great coffee tradition.)
Direct trade – which also means intensive communication between the buyer and the grower – stands in stark contrast to the old (but still prevalent) model, in which international conglomerates buy coffee by the steamer ship, through brokers, for the lowest price the commodity market will bear. It also represents, at least for many in the specialty coffee world, an improvement on labels like Fair Trade, bird-friendly or organic. Such labels relate to how the coffee is grown and may persuade consumers to pay a little extra for their beans, but they offer no assurance about flavor or quality.
Direct-trade coffee companies, on the other hand, see ecologically sound agriculture and prices above even the Fair Trade premium both as sound business practices and as a route to better-tasting coffee. By spending months every year visiting farms, these roasters seek to offer coffee that is produced as well as it can be, bought responsibly and roasted carefully. They aim, simply, to sell the best coffee possible. “It’s an exploration of coffee’s flavor, really” is how George Howell explains his mission. Howell, who runs George Howell Coffee, a roaster based in Acton, Massachusetts, has had a hand in practically every lurch forward in the quality coffee scene since he started out in the business in 1974.
“We’re finding flavors we’ve never ever tasted before, different fruit and floral flavors from really pristine, clean coffees. These are flavors that have been lost or diluted in the old methods of blending coffee down to an average product.”
In many ways, the direct-trade roasters are building on the foundation laid by companies like Peet’s and, later, Starbucks, which went outside the commodity system to find superior coffee. But, Blumhardt said, those companies are too big to comb over every bean in every sack the way some direct-trade companies do. Starbucks bought more than 300 million pounds, or about 136 million kilograms, of coffee in 2006; Intelligentsia, the biggest of this group, bought 2 million pounds. Sometimes, these explorations spring from serendipity.
Peter Giuliano, co-owner and director of coffee for Counter Culture Coffee, spoke with palpable excitement about stumbling upon a Central American farm planted with geishas – a plant known to yield especially high quality beans. (This year, Esmeralda Especial, a Panamanian coffee produced exclusively from geisha beans, earned the highest price ever paid in a coffee auction.) More often, roasters connect with growers through tasting competitions. The most prestigious of these are the annual Cup of Excellence competitions, now organized in eight coffee-growing countries by a U.S.-based nonprofit group, an event Prince of Coffeegeek calls “Coffee”s Olympics.” These blind-tasting competitions take as long as 10 days, after which the organizers auction the coffees online to bidders around the world, who compete fiercely for the beans. Sorenson recently spent more than $100,000 for a batch of coffee beans that took top honors at the Nicaraguan Cup of Excellence competition this year. The coffee, from Las Golondrinas, Marcio Benjamín Peralta Paguaga’s farm in Nicaragua, sold for $47.06 a pound, just shy of $40 more than the winner earned in 2006 . But for Sorenson, who said the unusual “mango, peach, cantaloupe and jasmine flower” flavors made it the finest Nicaraguan coffee he had ever tasted, it was worth it
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. Counter Culture started buying from Finca Mauritania, Aída Batlle’s farm on the slopes of the Santa Ana volcano in El Salvador, after the farm’s coffee won attention at the 2003 Cup of Excellence in El Salvador. After working with Batlle for a few years, visiting the farm regularly and sampling beans produced under a range of conditions, Giuliano has asked her to pick the coffee berries when “half the fruit is at a burgundy red ripeness and the rest when it’s bright red,” a mix that Giuliano says yields just the right sweetness in a finished cup.
One of the most effective methods of encouraging change turns out to be as simple as sharing a few cups of coffee with the people who grow it. Watts said that cupping (coffee lingo for the formal tasting process used to evaluate quality) can help growers understand what a buyer is looking for. “There has to be a real financial incentive for every incremental improvement in quality, but it can’t be mysterious,” he said. “It has to be objective. The grower has to have every reason to believe that his investment in his farm is an investment in himself, not just him doing what some crazy American wants him to.”
Source: www.iht.com
