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…