Ladies & gentlemen- the Nod. A weekly note from Intelligentsia Coffee’s VP of Coffee, Geoff Watts. It is e-mailed to Everyday Joe’s (because we use the beans roasted by our friends in Chicago), and then we post it here for you, because we love you. Enjoy.
A Nod or two ago I started reflecting on how my relationship with traveling has changed over the years and especially how some things that never before had seemed burdensome were now beginning to feel a bit wearying. That’s to be expected, I suppose…most things are more exciting when they are new, and it is easy to disregard small drawbacks when one is so entertained and occupied with assimilating fresh experience. It strikes me that somehow this condition must sit at the epicenter of the Happiness equation—the ability to continuously experience the world and its sensory delights with fresh eyes, the ability to soak it all up and never get saturated. Wasn’t there a film about that? “The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” I think it was. It might be interesting to watch that in a double-feature with “Groundhog Day” and juxtapose those two scenarios.
Regardless of the fact that some things in life seem destined to become mildly less stimulating after much routine and repetition, there are, fortunately, always surprises. And every year there are trips that end up being particularly inspiring, stretches of days or weeks that leave me feeling renewed with the kind of silly but invigorating and intoxicating optimism that you can almost bathe in.
This last trip was that way. I spent the weekend in Cali, Colombia doing some roasting and cupping at Café Palo Alto, a small coffee company that I help run there. Often when I’m working there, I feel as though I’ve stepped into the way-back machine, remembering the days when Intelligentsia was just a tiny retail outfit with a 12-kg roaster in the store. It’s a lot of fun. The challenges that come with operating a start-up business are of course all too real, and I suspect relatively similar for all new business owners regardless of location, but I enjoy the simplicity of dealing with a compact and immediate universe where most decisions feel comfortably free of weight.
After a couple of days I was joined by Mary and Neil Smith, two Chicagoans who had bid on and won a “coffee origin trip” that we had sponsored in a charity fundraiser last summer. Before the trip started, I must admit that I was a little less than enthused about the prospect of chaperoning a trip with two complete strangers. People are strange, that we all know very well. Some nice, some not so nice, some happy-go-lucky, some just plain unhappy, some frivolous, some cynical and some defeated. But this was a blast. These two new friends, one of them a professional in the high-quality fresh fish industry and the other a now full-time musician, went with me to Cajibio (about two hours from Cali, close to the old colonial city Popayan) to visit a farm called Santuario. You’ll be hearing a lot about this farm in the coming months and years—it is a breathtaking example of what can be done with resources and intention, and I hope that it may serve as a model for future generations of coffee farmers.
What makes it so inspiring? Part of it has to do with providence. I can’t shake this feeling that for some reason I’ve met this farmer at precisely the right moment in time, the right point of convergence in the coffee world, a time when both of us are ready to take the tools we’ve developed and map out what the future of coffee can look like. Coffee 2000. The new deal. You see, this farm is the farm of dreamers. It was started in 2001 at a time when investing in growing coffee seemed like a patently ludicrous proposition. The market was in the gutter, the planet was oversupplied with poor quality coffees, and the immediate future seemed pretty bleak for most growers around the world. Farms were going out of business left and right, and would continue to do so for the next four years. Many economists probably would have recommended gambling on NBA games or selling typewriters as more promising career moves. Milk-based drinks were dominating the landscape in the US and overseas retail markets, new “energy drinks” were capturing the attention of the sugar-addicted youth population, and coffee beans themselves had somehow become the least expensive part of most “coffee” beverages.
Still, Camilo Merizalde decided he wanted to grow coffee. Wow. I’m quite certain more than a few trusted friends were suspicious that someone must have slipped something into Camilo’s aguardiente. Coffee? The same crop that has bankrupted thousands of farmers and held millions more in a state of perpetual uncertainty and debt? Where production costs are rising at a pace that far exceeds rising values? Where small changes in world climate could throw the whole formula out of whack? Yes, that one. A fool’s pursuit.
I’m sure he heard a lot of that, but he was driven. He apparently caught what I myself am afflicted with, and what many a friend has experienced in the past—coffee has a seductive power. It gets in your system and won’t leave. It offers incredible intrigue, much like wine but far more complex. More fascinating than a yellow submarine and with more potential to impact human lives in a positive way than perhaps any crop in existence. But it can be an unpredictable and capricious companion, elusive and frustratingly impermanent.
So Camilo planted coffee. He took what was at the time nothing but pasture land, nearly barren, and created a farm. And he did it as dreamer and a perfectionist would, taking nearly two years to consult with farmers, agronomists, environmental engineers, coffee roasters and exporters before getting it up and running. The result is a coffee lover’s fantasy, a perfect marriage of exceptional environmental advantages and an engineer’s sense of orchestrated harmony. Most of the farm sits at close to 2000 meters, a glorious altitude for the best types of coffee tree. It is partitioned in a sensible fashion, divided into lots of Typica, Bourbon, and other heirloom varieties of coffee that are revered for the cup characteristics of their seeds. Each section was planned out meticulously based on advice from field-leading agronomists, with a big variety of different shade tree species and other plants spaced appropriately to promote the symbiotic ecosystem interactivity and minimize the need for additional inputs to keep the coffee healthy.
Having the farm organized as such will allow Camilo to identify specific niches on the farm that produce unusual quality and provides for the harvesting of coffees by variety—something many farms lack since varieties tend to be interspersed in such a way as to make them impossible to isolate. Currently, Camilo has nearly 20 additional varieties growing in a test garden, soldiers preparing even now for a time in the distant future. Over the next several years we will work together to classify the quality traits and potential of all of these experimental coffee types, looking to identify some treasures. And knowing Camilo, we’ll be experimenting together every single year as we try to fine-tune the processing methodologies in order to get maximum sensory expression in the coffees.
It’s a little paradise there, and I’m extremely excited to be working with a farmer who shares our vision and is just crazy enough to be willing to take necessary risks that would cause most others to balk. That’s how progress is made, and while it is surely premature to make any grand proclamations about how together we will redefine the model for both coffee grower and coffee roaster, there is nothing wrong with dreaming.
I’ll share more about Santuario and the rest of the trip to Colombia in next week’s Nod. For now, get yourselves ready for an impending onslaught of new crop coffees from Central America and East Africa. Port strikes and unexpected rains have collaborated to delay shipment of many of the coffees we normally expect to have ready for sale in June, but the tide is about to come in. Over the next weeks expect to see new Direct Trade coffees from Kenya, Tanzania, El Salvador, Honduras, Costa Rica, and Guatemala showing up on the offering sheet. In the meantime, we are proud to launch the 2008 edition of Los Delirios our Organic Direct Trade offering from Nicaragua. Enjoy!
As always, find our Nods at:
http://www.intelligentsiacoffee.com/origin/offerings.
Onward,
Geoff Watts
VP of Coffee
Intelligentsia Coffee & Tea
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