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.