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… 

Unconventional entrepreneurial steps.

A story about a friend. 

Village and football field. Road to Huehuetenango. July 1, 2003.

My name is Josué Morales, and I have been working in the specialty coffee industry since 2003. I often tell the story that when I was getting started, I bought my first bag of coffee from Finca Huixoc in Huehuetenango, and that is true, from a certain point of view. 

It is true from the perspective that it was the first bag of coffee I bought with the intention of growing a business. But before buying that bag, there was another one. 

I studied political science in university. It seemed like a good idea back then. Studying that career taught me two specific things about my country, Guatemala. The first, that I needed to learn about economics in order to understand Human Action. Second, that this country was built on the most terrible of historical injustices.

The rest of the lessons are vague at this point, but those two lessons allowed me to see the very different realities we live in this country, and it allowed me to meet people from all walks of life. 

Learning about economics brought me to understand and believe in the foundations of a free society based on private property and the rule of law. My exposure to meeting all sorts of people, particularly in rural Guatemala, led me to understand why the construct of the Western ideas that give frame to modern economics are in conflict when applied to the Mayan reality. 

In my pursuit of understanding this duality I found myself traveling to a village called Santa Cruz Barillas in the northern part of Huehuetenango, which is the roughest and most remote area in the country. 

This town felt like the tropical version of a scene out of the Wild West. A few blocks surrounded a square and a main street. The town and its villages were divided in three main groups. One integrated by people returning from Mexico after the Civil War in Guatemala, second by those who were the former guerilla, and third by those who were former paramilitary. 

Barillas Huehuetenango in the year 2003 was still very raw from a ruptured social fabric after six decades of conflict. The people from the town, maybe six to seven thousand people, were interested in politics and coffee, and of course, football. I decided to be interested in coffee. 

I wanted to bring back to Guatemala City a sack of coffee, and I was told that purchasing at the local cooperative called Asobagri or “the Barilense” would be too complicated, and it would be better if I went to “El Chino” who was “the guy” for coffee in these corner of the woods. 

He wasn’t there at the time, instead I was referred to his brother, who ran the cooperative anyways, but who sold me a bag out of his own production. That timeline is better explained in my article: How I became a coffee producer. 

My first few customers were already asking for some of the coffee from Barillas after handing out my first samples. This coffee appealed to a broader audience by being sweeter, more aromatic and less intense than the higher grown Huehuetenango coffees, and I needed more of it. 

I did eventually catch up with “El Chino” after a series of very bizarre phone calls. We agreed to have a late night meeting in an old neighborhood just north of the historic district of Guatemala City. 

Upon leaving university at around 9pm I called him up to confirm, it would be a very late night meeting at that point. He confirmed, and asked me very mysteriously if I could bring him a couple of cases of beer. After answering I wasn’t sure if I could, he told me that if I didn’t bring the beer, I shouldn’t show up at all. 

I had just enough money in my pocket to buy exactly a couple of cases of beer… as if he knew. A case of beer in Guatemala contains 24 cans.  

There was no cold beer at the gas station where I stopped so I bought the cases at room temperature, it was too late to be drinking on a school night anyways. 

Almost an hour later I rang the bell. He opened a latch on the door and surveyed the surroundings, opened a sliver of the door and upon seeing the cases of beers in my hands he rushed me to get in. 

There was a dimly lit dining room with very hard wooden chairs where we sat down in silence. He pulled out two beers out of one of the cases, snapped them open, placed one in front of me, and the other infront of him. He lit up a cigarette, looked me straight in the eye and asked: “so, what did you want to talk about?”

“I would like to buy coffee from you.” I answered. He just smiled between puffs of smoke and leaned forward towards me and said, “and what are we going to talk about?”

During the hours that passed I learned he had been a member of the guerrillas in Guatemala. He was a mixture between a Bond-Villain and the cool uncle I never had. Full of stories on how he had outsmarted the army and survived during all those years. 

He wanted to get to the root of me. Instigating with questions, trying to find the contradictions, probing to find a reaction, facing me with controversy. I was debating with a well versed and profound Marxist with my precarious knowledge of Mises and Hayek. He wouldn’t even stop at Keynes, it was a full swing to the profound depths of the revolutionary world. 

At the height of his methodology to convert my mind, what he wanted to know is if I could feel the struggle of “the people,” of the masses, of the unprivileged, of the proletariat! I want to believe that the only argument in my favor that night was used against him with his own words. I answered that I do feel and relate to the struggle, but that I could never “be the people” because “the people” have no historic memory. 

There was a silence. We had finished the first case of beer when he made a pause to open another pack of cigarettes. I found it would be the right moment to ask if he would sell me coffee?

He roared in laughter. Already with bloodshot eyes and tipsy. “Of course I will! What are you thinking? Of course I’ll sell you coffee!” He repeated this over and over as he kept on laughing. 

I let out a long exhale in relief. More relaxed, I proceeded to ask: “so, what’s the price?”

He immediately sobered up, sat straight, looked me again straight in the eye and without losing eye contact pulled out and opened another two cans of beer from the second case. He placed one in front of me, and one in front of him and said, “kid, I ain’t that drunk yet.” 

After being sick for a couple of days from drinking a whole case of warm beer, my hands were still shaking when I dialed “El Chino’s” number. 

The coffee was already on its way. Apparently, I had named a number of coffee sacks I had already purchased, most importantly, there was a price by which he swore I had agreed to purchase. 

I had just received my first lesson on high diplomacy and negotiation.

I don’t believe I ever sat down to drink with him ever again, but we did become friends that night. Over the years he would gladly teach me how to maneuver the inner workings of one of the most complicated regions in the coffee world. 

I am very saddened to have learned that “El Chino” passed away this morning from COVID-19. He was buried in a common grave in Quetzaltenango, without a name, just like all his fallen brothers and sisters were buried during the war. 

The bullets couldn’t catch you, but the Corona did. 

So long, my friend… and cheers!