When success leads to failure

How real people can become the greatest challenge to Human Centered Design 

Palencia, Guatemala. January 20, 2013.

The rain found them sleeping, rolled up in their ponchos like mummies. At first they thought they were dreaming. They were longing so much for rain that they dreamed about it. But they were awake, with their eyes open in the dark, listening to the reins of heaven, and with the might of the thunder they couldn’t sleep again. The day grew slow to come, for them to see their lands wet. The dogs came into the ranches. The water also came into the ranches, like a dog through its house. The women pushed closer to the men, even in their sleep they were scared of the tempest and the lightning. 

Gratitude must smell, if it has any smell, like wet soil. They had their chest full of gratitude and every few minutes they would say: “May God pay God.” The men grow sleazy when they have sowed and it doesn’t rain, women suffer their bad temper, and that’s why those abundant waters sounded like joy for the women who were half asleep. The color of their breasts, the same color as the wet dirt. The black nipples. The moistness of a nipple full of milk. The wet soil was like that breast that provides nurture. Yes, the earth is like a big breast and all the pawns hungry for the harvest are attached to it, desiring milk that really tastes like the milk of a woman, that tastes like the young sugar cane when bitten into. If it rains it's easy to see, there’s philosophy. If it doesn’t, there’s only drama. A blessing of planting. How evenly they sprouted with the first rains. Something never seen before. Each one was going to harvest sixty bushels. More or less, seventy. Maybe more. Never less. And the beans, how were they not to grow so well? If beans were native here, and the seeds they brought were famous! And pumpkins, they would have to spear. They might even sow a second time. How useless of them if they didn’t take advantage of the moment. It was proven that God didn’t take it as an offense when they tricked the old man. Cheating the rich is the law of the poor. The proof was these amazing rains. Not even if they had designed them. Oh, man. When they start grilling the corn. That’s what they would say, believing that time would be slow, they could feel how they were already grilling it over a slow fire because it's no good if it goes too fast.

– “Men of Maize.” Miguel Angel Asturias. 

My name is Josué Morales and I have been working in the specialty coffee industry since 2003. The cycle to finally execute a strategy that would enable me to tackle the market behavior took me fifteen years to close. 

My experience of working with communities in Guatemala up to the year 2010 was so disappointing that for years I avoided working with communities and cooperatives. As my views of economics strengthened also did the knowledge that business is not done between organizations, or between countries, but between people. I avoided the possibility of engaging in business where decisions were not taken by one or two individuals. 

But as we say in my country, necessity has the face of a hungry dog. Perverse situations continued to spread in the country, between insecurity, extortions, migration, leaf rust, lack of access to capital for coffee in the banking sector, the collapse of the global market prices, and the generational changes. Many of the larger farms I worked with, or was prospecting to work with, started losing the will or the possibility to continue. 

Coffee, being a cash crop, made its base out of the small producer in order to continue supplying the market. Whether I wanted to or not, I also had to start looking in the direction of the small producer. 

I had to search well among my feelings about the failure in Quiché in order to set it aside and to be able to design a new way of engaging with small producers. This was the key word. I had to design a way to make this possible. 

Read the whole story about Quiché: What does Human Centered coffee production mean to me?

The eternal problem of any farmer is money. It's never enough. Even when it's enough, it will not be enough as the uncertainty of being in agriculture in a very vulnerable country can only allow to measure results one harvest at a time. Some you lose, some you don’t lose as bad, some there’s a little left to keep the faith on what we do. 

Guatemala is a country where there’s no access to credit, there’s no venture capital, and no investors that will invest without a colonial mentality. The model for financing that existed in the coffee industry during the second half of the twentieth century consisted in recurring to receive loans from exporting houses on the promise of delivering the future harvest.

This model failed as well, and not only did it get the exporters broke, but the producers and half of the country’s production was lost more because of this than because of any natural catastrophe. 

The design of a new supply chain couldn’t be based exclusively on money. Even if it was available, the current models that were in place up until 2010 weren’t working. In order to move the industry forward and create a movement focused on quality something needed to happen that was completely outrageous and out of the box. 

Cooperativa del Tomastepec in Palencia was the first Cooperative I chose to work with after many years of avoiding collective enterprises. 

Tomastepec is integrated by perhaps some of the most stubborn people I have ever met. They had one advantage: they had built a centralized processing station. It was the dirtiest, most poorly planned, and most dysfunctional processing station, but they had one.

Josué Morales (center), explaining how to dry coffee at the Cooperativa Tomastepec. January 30, 2014.

This cooperative was a couple of hours away from Guatemala City so it made sense for me to work with them. I could drive up there every weekend, or as often as needed. I was finally able to have a place where we could separate the production from many different producers from one area to understand what each one of them contributed individually. 

This processing station meant that I would have the opportunity to taste coffee with the producers themselves, but most important, I was in sufficient proximity that problems could be identified immediately and changes made just as fast. 

The process of identifying problems, ideating, testing, and executing was done on a weekly basis. This is what made all the difference in creating the opportunities for success. We were no longer waiting a year to test, we were waiting days. 

I needed to produce coffee around the idea of having an identity, even if that meant it was a collective identity. Designing the process to achieve this needed to be centered for and around the variables that affect the people who produce the coffee. But it wasn’t only about the quality and keeping things separate. All design is inherently human centered because it's about how a person interacts with a product, a service, a system, and with each other. 

So having the coffee come at the right time, to the right place, to be processed with the utmost quality without exactly having the infrastructure to make it happen required much more than just picking coffee at its ripest. 

We, and I say we because all the members of the Cooperative and I spent countless hours meeting every Saturday at their warehouse in Palencia debating the ideas I was proposing; we came up with a schedule of deliveries so that we would get to process at least two lots for every producer during the harvest. 

We came up with a calendar system of appointments that was designed based on distance, the vehicle coffee was being brought in with, and how the cycle of ripening was dispersed among the farms of the group. Everyone knew when they were supposed to deliver so they could bring in their most uniform picking and coffee from their healthiest trees. 

Josué Morales, middle row third from the left, and the board members of the Cooperativa del Tomastepec. Palencia, August 29, 2015.

More than depending on knowledge about coffee processing and production, quality, in this case, depended on timely logistics. 

It took hard conversations and hard work to commit, to show up, and the consistent determination to fight with all my conviction for ideas that defied head-on the “this is how we’ve always done it before.” 

In the end, my colossal efforts rendered the results that we all needed: the coffee from the entire harvest was sold. 

This also meant two things, two opposite things. 

First, my program had created a set of conditions that had never existed before, in which coffee could be perfected, tested, and brought to market at a rhythm that allowed for the coffee to be sold by the time harvest ended, at a price that made all the efforts possible. Most importantly, solving the main problem which was liquidity. 

Human Centered continuous improvement had been designed and tested, and it had worked. 

Second, that my program led to an unprecedented successful harvest. This was interpreted by my friends at Tomastepec as having found “the recipe” to produce coffee. They interpreted the success of my methodology as a consequence of their coffee being inherently superior in quality, and not because we had spent two years designing a procedure for that quality to happen. 

They were convinced that any additional design processes wouldn’t be necessary now that their coffee was finally being discovered. Stubborn as they were, no further improvement proposals would be tried or even considered from then on. 

They convinced themselves that their coffee was worth a price that the market wasn’t willing to tolerate. Making it impossible for me to continue growing the market, especially if I couldn’t continue to innovate. 

The President of the Cooperativa del Tomastepec during those years was don Higinio Gómez. He knew better. He finished his term and then left Tomastepec to follow me in the pursuit of more fertile soil to implement the design for quality and trade that we had created. This time it would be bigger, faster, and better. 

Coffee Hunting Part II

Quality happens by design, not by chance.

Finca Santa Isabel. San Cristobal Verapaz, Guatemala.

My name is Josué Morales and I have been working in the specialty coffee industry since 2003. I had been looking for Luis Valdes for months by the time he walked into my office during the harvest of 2012.

Luis, or as his friends call him, Wicho, was not impressed by me. It took me about a year to befriend Wicho, who was always very professional yet very distant. We Guatemalans like to joke around a little for no reason at all, even if we don’t know each other. Wicho would have none of that.

After we met he was starting to consider if he should give me more samples or not, probably wondering if I was wasting his time. I would call Wicho often trying to understand how, during the worst quality crisis in Central America, he was being able to produce the quality he was producing.

Leaf Rust, a fungal disease that makes a host out of coffee leaves restricting their ability to perform photosynthesis, has devastated the production of Guatemala not only in quantity but also in quality.

The profiles on Wicho’s coffee were expressive and vibrant. They reflected the characteristics of Guatemalan coffee the way they used to be prior to 2012. I needed to understand why this was happening at his farm, but it was very difficult since Wicho was a difficult person to become friends with.

Our first attempt at doing business happened fairly fast. We sold 4,500 pounds of coffee to a roastery called Water Avenue in Portland, Oregon. Needless to say, Wicho was not impressed.

I spent a significant portion of 2013 away from Guatemala. Partly to develop the markets for my coffee and partly to perform research in other producing origins that would allow me to understand how to adapt to the changing conditions we were facing.

When I came back to start preparing for the 2014 harvest, Wicho was one of the first people I called. All the time I had been away we hadn’t interacted and when he picked up the phone he was still his usual grumpy self.

“Wicho, I’m back.” I said as he answered the phone.

“Great.” He said very sarcastically, and already bored with having to talk to me.

“Listen Wicho, there’s something very important I need to ask you, that’s why I’m calling.”

“Ok, I’m listening.”

“Wicho, as you know, I’ve been away for a while.”

“Are you sure it was enough?” He was still being very dry.

“I think so. Listen there’s something really important I need to know. During the time I’ve been gone I really missed you and I would like to know if you missed me too?”

There was a long silence on the line. I gambled. For sure Wicho was never going to talk to me again after this.

All of a sudden, I hear this slow and steady laugh on the other side. He laughed so much.

“You son of a bitch, why the hell would you ever ask me that?” He kept laughing. “It’s the dumbest thing you’ve asked me so far.” More laughter. “The worst part is, I kind of did miss you.”

Finally! It had taken me over a year to befriend Wicho. My Human Centered approach was working. Friends or not, he still wouldn’t give me a break. He was quick to ask after that. “So, what the hell do you want now?”

After explaining to Wicho about my research he was finally interested in knowing more. I was presenting a series of information points that were new and different to the things that were mainstream about the Leaf Rust and the crisis that was being felt in the coffee industry.

The main quality problem we were facing as a producing country in 2013 is what I call The Premature Aging of Coffee. Which consists of coffee shortening its shelf life, between six and eight months, as opposed to somewhere between fourteen and eighteen months.

Coffee was developing flavors which are not associated with old coffee, but rather with a cardboard and papery taste. Acidity and complexity faded almost completely in a few months.

Also, coffee presented a significant loss in density and moisture readings, but also in the way the beans were roasted, requiring significant temperature adjustments.

Finca Santa Isabel was so important in understanding what was going on because of all the coffees I was working and consulting with. The coffee being produced by Wicho was the only one that did not present the problem of premature aging. On the contrary, this coffee had an extraordinarily long shelf life.

Wicho finally invited me to Finca Santa Isabel. During the week we spent together at the farm we would walk different sectors during the day and oversee coffee delivery in the evening.

Wicho and Josué at Finca Santa Isabel. October 4th, 2014.

At night, after dinner, we would brew a whole pot of coffee and continue to analyze and debate throughout the night. We evaluated every single variable in the process that could be affecting cup quality.

An important thing to point out about Finca Santa Isabel is that it’s located in one of the most hostile environments, in my opinion, to produce coffee in the whole country. It rains ten months out of the year because it’s a Rainforest at altitude, which means the region behaves like a rainforest but at much lower temperatures.

Due to the rain patterns coffee trees experience multiple and varied flowerings that require a very long harvest period.

Harvesting is done under the rain. Fertilization is done under the rain. Most of all farm management tasks are done under the rain. Drying is done even if it’s pouring rain. If you stand outside to have a cup of coffee in the morning the moisture is so thick that it feels as if you’re breathing rain.

So for Wicho something like the Leaf Rust, which thrives with humidity, wasn’t anything new. He had been dealing with Leaf Rust since the 1990’s. So this wasn’t anything that was a factor of compromising quality in his coffee.

The lessons I had learned during my travels to coffee plantations in Taiwan were congruent with the way Wicho was interacting with his farm and providing nutrition to his soil.

Full story here: How coffee growing in the center of Taiwan changed my life for good.

Picking at Finca Santa Isabel wasn’t exactly being done at the height of ripeness either. Urban legends say that only the ripest coffee cherries will render the sweetest coffee in the cup. This wasn’t the case here.

In the microclimate of the Rainforest where Finca Santa Isabel is located, if cherries are allowed to reach full maturation capacity they burst on the trees due to stress from the excess moisture and rainfall. When the cherry bursts open on the tree it produces cup quality problems like the taste of ferment and fenol in the cup, and no one wants to be drinking coffee that tastes like liquid detergent.

This was yet another thing Wicho had already figured out. He wasn’t allowing his cherries to reach full maturation capacity yet his coffee was off the charts in sweetness.

In the traditional washed methodology for processing coffee in Guatemala, coffee undergoes a spontaneous fermentation in large tanks after its been removed from the cherry skin or pulp. It’s also an urban legend that coffee needs to go through extended periods of fermentation in order to express the best of its character. Again, this was not the case at Finca Santa Isabel.

One by one, Wicho and I kept exploring all the variables trying to find inconsistent information that could provide evidence to prove or disprove what was causing the premature aging of coffee.

Drying was also out of the norm. Once coffee was washed after finalizing fermentation it was sent to the patio regardless of whether it was raining or not. Something completely unthinkable at any other farm, not only in Guatemala, but in any farm in a producing country.

Varieties weren’t the case either because even the ones considered as having a poor genetic material such as the Catimor, selected to be Leaf Rust resistant, were presenting an exceptional cup quality and shelf life.

Wicho and I spent many sleepless nights writing down ideas and observations. We would come up with something new that we had the opportunity to go out and try it immediately the morning after, just to fail and come back again to the drawing board every night.

It took us more than those nights during my first visit to Finca Santa Isabel to figure out how to correct coffee quality issues. It has taken us years.

It takes years of consistency to create quality.

In the case of coffee it takes years to understand how to interpret the way we interact with plant and soil based on how they answer to changing climate conditions. The relationship between these variables constitutes ninety percent of the success for quality in coffee.

My first visit to Finca Santa Isabel coincided with the eve of my first harvest directing Beneficio La Esperanza in Antigua Guatemala. A massive undertaking consisting of my ability to design a process that would enable a successful management of the remaining ten percent of the quality equation. Except that at La Esperanza coffee would be coming in from hundreds of different farms to be processed in a single place.

Those days with Wicho became an opportune and very timely retreat because it gave us a deeper understanding on how quality is built. Most importantly, it created the foundation for a very strong and long lasting friendship.

In the end, the taste of the cup can even tell you if there’s a strong friendship behind the design of the production process, a relevant detail that a scorecard can’t possibly ever reveal.

Coffee Hunting

Alley in San Juan La Laguna, Lake Atitlán. Guatemala, November 2019.

Quality can sometimes be a scavenger hunt. 

My name is Josué Morales and I’ve been working in the specialty coffee industry since 2003. Sometime during the harvest of 2012 I experienced the thrill of discovering a new coffee that was superior to most of the coffees I had tasted up to that point in my career. 

There’s a special kind of anticipation about receiving a coffee sample. The texture, the smell, the way the coffee seeds look before being roasted. I like to grab handfuls of the un roasted coffee seeds and take a deep breath holding them right against my nose. There’s a story to be told in every single detail. 

Sometimes the seeds look pale green, sometimes they look deep blue, and sometimes they have a gray color like that of concrete or the ash of a bonfire the morning after. The appearance is complemented by the smells. 

Fresh and herbal scent often indicates that the coffee has been sun dried on a patio. If it smells faintly of wood, particularly that unmistakable smell of smoke from humid wood burning right before sunset in any rural home of Guatemala, it often indicates that the coffee was finished using a mechanical dryer. 

There are also those coffees that smell like fresh bread out of the oven, and the ones that smell like dates and prunes that have been locked up in a box for a long time. These are coffees that have taken longer periods of time to rest with little to no friction to compromise the integrity of their structure. 

I learned this by crouching down on the drying patio of every coffee farm I ever visited during harvest, and holding up to my nose those handfuls of coffee that were close to finish drying. I would do the same in the areas where they had mechanical dryers, and during the years I was operating the machine to mill my own bags of coffee I would do the same out of every bag I opened. 

Between the years 2011 and 2016 I would be on the road for weeks at a time going from farm to farm all around Guatemala. I would arrive at different houses and different warehouses every day, and I would gather the coffee samples from all the people I was working with, or intended to work with. 

It would take weeks for me to be able to taste the coffee. Up in the mountains there wasn’t even decent coffee, if any coffee at all to drink, let alone a way to get an idea on how those coffee samples would turn out once I finally had them roasted. So I trained myself to pay attention to all these little details that would be among the few things to have an immediate parameter on quality that I could talk about with the producers. 

I would arrive back in Guatemala City with the car packed to the roof with hundreds of coffee samples that needed to be catalogued, analyzed and tasted. Each bag ranging anywhere from half a pound to a couple of pounds.

The majority of those samples were processed by individual producers, in their own individual way, with different machinery, a different care, and a different idea on how the process needed to be achieved. 

Some of these coffees were dried on rooftops, some in the parking area of the houses where the producers lived, and some, where there is excess humidity, would even be dried in the living rooms on sacks of coffee placed on top of wooden boards that laid on the dirt floor. 

The old guys that ran the patios, the few that remained from the time of “the grandfathers” that had started the farms, would “just know” when a coffee was ready to finish drying by chewing and biting into a coffee seed. Something I learned as well during those visits. 

Standing in front of the sample roaster I’ve always thought about the moment of roasting a coffee as its final stage of becoming. It's the step, out of all steps taken in the making of that coffee, that will finish what started almost a year before when the coffee trees flowered in order to bear fruit. 

As the moisture leaves the seeds when they’re starting to brown, the smells of fruit and spices blend in unison with the surface on the coffee starting to corrugate, mimicking the mountains and the valleys where it came from. The pockets of moisture show themselves as the coffee swells and builds the necessary heat momentum to caramelize its sugars and become roasted. 

Batch after batch the sensations are different. The colors and the smells, the time, and the way the seeds react to heat will vary depending on the characteristics of the place the coffee comes from. Even coffees from the same farm, harvested on different days, will reveal different personalities and behaviors. 

After doing this for long enough it’s almost possible to tell when a coffee has potential. They reveal themselves within the first minutes inside the roaster by invading the room with fragrant and loud aromas, and the unmistakable violence of their popping sounds once almost all moisture has left the seed, a point known as the first crack. 

I have the bad habit of chewing a roasted coffee seed immediately after each sample has been roasted. The anticipation is just too high to wait a little longer. Coffee is finally ground and infused to be tasted or cupped, usually the day after roasting. 

The experience then becomes a process of interpreting. A translation of sensory exploration that needs to find a way to fit into words that can describe the taste that is being perceived in the pallet. 

Occasionally there will be a sample, out of the hundreds (and nowadays thousands) of little plastic bags that carries a message that is loud and clear. It will communicate details, not exactly about the impeccable attention to detail it received during its making, but about the sheer luck in the combination of factors that allowed it to become this exemplary expression of the trinity formed between soil, climate and plant. 

These samples are rare, I’ve experienced maybe one or two per year during the last ten years of tasting coffee almost every single day. There are entire years where they just won’t happen at all. 

I imagine these are the coffees some people, lacking a qualitative toolbox to describe them, use the quantitative scale and refer to them as ninety point coffees. I really wouldn’t know. What I do know is that, once I find them, I try to the best of my abilities to locate their source, to find where they come from, and, most importantly, to find the person who produced it.

During the harvest of 2012 I tasted the coffee from Vinaros for the very first time. A coffee from the rainforest region of Cobán. It was something new and refreshing and in a flavor spectrum unlike anything else on my portfolio. The coffee sample had made its way to my hands, somehow. 

During the months that followed I kept asking everyone I knew about that farm, trying to find a connection. I later learned that Vinaros was a name used less often than the main farm it belonged to, a farm called Finca Santa Isabel owned by a guy that was really hard to find. 

One day, as I stood in the reception area of the Lab in Guatemala City, this tough looking fellow opened the door. 

He was pointing a finger at me as he stared and asked “are you Josué?”

“Yes I am, who are you?” I answered. 

“What do you want?” 

I was like, “what do you mean, what do I want?”

“People tell me you’ve been asking about me, so what do you want?”

I was still very puzzled. “Who the hell are you? And what do you want?” 

“My name is Luis Valdes, from Finca Santa Isabel. You wanted to find me, so here I am, what do you want?”

To be continued…