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… 

When the jungle goes quiet.

There are stories told that no one believes anymore.

Steps at the Mayan Archeological Site of Tak’alik Ab’aj. November, 2004.

“There are stories told that no one believes anymore -not even the grandmothers or the children-, this city was built on cities that were buried in the center of America. The rocks in their walls were bound together with milk.

To signal their first foundations, thirty feathers and thirty joints of powdered gold were buried in envelopes next to the bad weeds, according to a very loud account of many generations; they were buried in a rotten tree trunk, others say, they were buried under logs cut down for firewood,
or in the mountain where the fountains spring.

There is a belief that trees exhale the breath of the people that inhabit the buried cities and this is why, according to legend, in their shade those seeking council from matters of the soul and of the heart find comfort, the lost birds find their way, and the poets receive inspiration.

Trees bewitch the whole town.

– Excerpt from “Legends of Guatemala” by Miguel Angel Asturias.”

My name is Josué Morales and I have been working in the specialty coffee industry since 2003. Most of my work has been done in the Highlands of Guatemala, but I’ve always had a special place in my heart for the coffees grown at lower altitudes.

One hundred years ago the vast majority of coffee being produced in Guatemala was grown at low to mid altitude in an area called the Boca Costa. This is a region that is located at the plains that stretch from the Pacific Ocean all the way to the steep climb to the high altitude barrier formed by the chain of volcanoes.

Retalhuleu is located at the heart of the Boca Costa, about halfway between Antigua Guatemala and the border with Mexico. We seldom think of it as a region for coffee production because it now produces mostly sugar cane, rubber and palm oil.

Abandoned rubber fields. Retalhuleu, Guatemala. June, 2015.

There is a farm in Retalhuleu called Montes Eliseos. I first arrived there in November of 2004. Making my way slowly up a muddy dirt road for about forty five minutes, it was easy to tell I was getting closer as I heard the unmistakable sound of coffee pulping machines roaring.

The washing station at this farm is still powered by a massive generator from the 1780’s that creates electricity from the current of a river. The coffee produced here tastes like hot chocolate with blackberry jam on pancakes. Not a faintly diluted hot chocolate, but a strong chocolate taste.

Dinner was served early because there is no electricity in the dining area, which is located about a half a mile’s walk across the subtropical rainforest. We sat in wooden tables enshrined by a ranch built around the sculpture of a very rare ancient deity revered by both the Mayan and the Aztec Civilizations: the God of Rain.

After dinner I joined the workers in gathering around a fire right outside the ranch. Stories were told about the forest, about ghosts, about an ancient cemetery that was found when the farm was being planted, and most important, about one of the oldest cities of the Mayan Civilization that was also found when the coffee trees started to be planted.

The site is called Tak'alik Ab'aj and it was one of the most important commercial, ceremonial, and political cities of the Preclassic and Classic periods. It derives its importance from the link that it provided for long-distance Maya trade routes that covered an area that included at least the south of Mexico, El Salvador and the highlands of Guatemala. 

It’s one of the largest sites with sculptured monuments on the Boca Costa and it has one of the greatest concentrations of Olmec sculptures outside of Mexico. It was here where some of the last remnants of the Olmec merged with some of the earliest of the Maya. Stela 2 of Tak'alik Ab'aj contains the earliest known inscription of a date in the format of The Long Count, what is vulgarly known as the Mayan Calendar. 

When I visited, only about 5% of the city had been unearthed. The most puzzling of pieces was one of the first altar style structures. The standing stone that gives name to the place is made from a type of rock that can only be found hundreds of miles away. Weighing several tons, it poses one of those ancient mysteries of how it got there. There is an inscription on it that says the rock is a gift from The Rulers of the North to The Rulers of the South.

After many stories had been told, everyone started going to bed. Everyone had their bed in the building next to the ranch, except me. Because I was a guest, I was to stay in the house of the farm. Alone. I was given a torch and told not to stray away from the path and that, no matter what I saw or heard, I should never attempt to run. 

There’s something about the forests of the Boca Costa that makes them feel timeless. The ages are felt under their shade and in every step taken on their silent soils. The night time, however, is a whole different story.

The greens come to life and seem brighter around the circle of the torch. Sounds are loud in every direction as the darkness explodes in life. Being delighted by this exuberantly vibrant concert of the most diverse sounds of life, there is no experience more terrifying than sudden and absolute silence. 

Never attempt to run!

In the middle of the emptiness, I started hearing my own breathing, and even my own heartbeat. Drops of nervous sweat ran down like tears in my eyes. 

The grunt of the jaguar is like the sound of a saw cutting through wood in one single direction. I couldn’t really hear it with my ears. I felt it inside my head and from there the vibration resonated throughout my body.

Legend has it that jaguars don’t attack men. I kept deliberately thinking that to myself as I continued to walk slowly, while fighting the urge to run. 

I don’t think I could have screamed even if I wanted to. 

The jaguar is also the only feline that doesn’t kill by the jugular. Its jaw evolved in such a way that it pops the skull of its prey for a more efficient kill. Another reassuring thought.

Past the gate I could feel life finally but slowly start flowing back into my veins.

I made it to the room. Alive. 

From there to the restroom there was another half a block, down some frog ridden steps towards the water reservoirs below. In the middle of the night I woke up to take a necessary walk that was interrupted by the sight of the lonely chapel across the courtyard.

An old little church with doors wide open and completely lit up with oil lamps and candles, and no one in sight except for a dog that sat in the porch area of my room. 

Night view of the room where I slept in the Boca Costa. November, 2004.

I couldn’t really sleep well. The best part about it was the sounds of dawn. The first clearings of light and the sunrise delayed behind the massive Santa María Volcano. On the side, the Santiaguito Volcano fuming a single thread of constant smoke.

The sudden warmth of the lowlands reminded me that I was here to further my learning path.

My first friends in the coffee industry were on average forty to fifty years older than me. Most of them were coffee producers, yet some of them had been tasters and buyers for the coffee companies that shaped the producing world into servicing the growing global demand for quality.

Japanese, German, French, and a handful of Americans became a valuable bank of knowledge that invested in my formation as a taster and coffee professional. They mentored me, yelled at me, became disillusioned with me, and I want to believe that they ultimately felt proud of me. Ambassadors from a different era that life placed fortuitously in my path.

I learned from them the importance of the low grown coffees, one of the reasons that brought me to this farm.

Low grown coffees are highly soluble, extremely aromatic, and provide a greater balance to taste when used appropriately in blends, especially in those blends used for espresso. A lost art, like that of making clean classic malt whiskey.

The scale of scoring a coffee has made it so that the interpretation is based on loudness and not in the uniqueness of the expressions of taste, unfairly punishing certain origins and regions and killing the price incentive that would allow for them to become the best expression of themselves.

New tasters have been flocking the novelty of big and loud profiles as a result of extreme processing styles. These coffees are surely a fast track to stand out, and the most controversial tastes are often mistaken for the expression of quality. 

This is not the only way to stand out. This is not the only way to understand quality. There is the way of the legends that came before me. There is the way of the stories that shaped my learning path. There is the way of the forests that imprinted an unequivocal voice into the evolution of taste.

I am certain that the pendulum will swing back towards a newfound appreciation of taste that does not fit in a scorecard. Tastes that amaze by revealing the simple but magical aspects of terroir. 

I’ll be waiting, patiently. 

The changing culture of taste.

How climate change is altering the way we appreciate coffee.

Cupping the Top 30 coffees from Guatemala for 2020.

My name is Josué Morales and I’ve been in the specialty coffee industry since 2003. 

Wine is an industry that most other agricultural products with an added value aspire to become. Wine makers and marketers have done their work so well that even consumers who have a limited knowledge on the process of wine are aware that there are at least a few things that make one wine different from another. 

Most consumers understand that there is a marked difference between origins, or what country the wine comes from. Most consumers know that wines can be told apart by the botanical varietal and that based on it there can be certain expectations of taste. Then there’s the vintage, or the year in which a wine was bottled. It even goes to the extent that a minimum notion of paring is common knowledge when serving red wine for red meats and white wines for seafood. 

More refined connoisseurs of wine will go as deep as knowing specific regions, methods of production, and will even look for wines from specific Estates or families. They will go to great lengths and pay exuberant amounts of money for rare and old wines. 

For the most part the average wine consumer is very forgiving. It's more about the feeling of exploration and discovery within a budget that guides decisions, and of course, there’s the buzz.

Coffee is following the footsteps of wine in many ways. Starbucks accelerated the learning curve in a very aggressive way. Consumers had the opportunity to be presented with a variety of origins such as in the wine industry. Countries such as Colombia, Brazil, Kenya and Guatemala became mainstream names for the consumer who had the ability to experience that each different producing origin possessed a different tastes and characteristics. 

What started with this giant chain evolved over the next couple of decades into a highly specialized and competitive market place. As the hunger for opportunity in the coffee business sparked the entrepreneurial spirit all over the world, so did the hunger to compete with increasingly detailed, specific and unique coffees. 

The learning curve for the coffee industry and for the consumer went quickly from merely identifying different degrees of roast and what they contribute to taste, into knowing the names of specific regions within producing countries. 

Thousands of roasting companies emerged all over the world and through their purchasing teams they traveled all of the producing origins in order to find the coffees from the highest quality that would fit their business models. As much as they built their brands they also built a stage for the recognition of the producer, and the names of specific farms and cooperatives started to have a following of their own. 

I was already working in coffee during the specialty roaster boom. During the first decade of my career there weren’t very many coffee buyers visiting origin, not compared to the way it is now. Those who were traveling back then had an advantage over the generation of buyers that came after in the sense that those producers making a better than average coffee would easily stand out. 

In 1999 a program called Cup of Excellence started which consisted of organizing a competition that would be judged by a jury composed of many of the buyers from the emerging coffee roasting companies from all over the world. Winning lots would then go to an auction where roasters would bid on these extraordinary coffees for extraordinary prices. 

Josué Morales with some of the key people involved in the creation of Cup of Excellence. Silvio Leite and Vanusia Nogueira from the Brasilian Specialty Coffee Association, and Mr. Hidetaka Hayashi of Hayashi Coffee Company in Japan. Vienna, July 2012.

The auction came to Guatemala in 2001 for the first time with outstanding results. The auction’s 17th edition will be held in a couple of weeks. 

One thing the auction does well is allowing a stage for otherwise unknown producers to make their way into the awareness of international buyers that bring with them opportunities for relationships and better prices.

The auction has become a barometer for the standards of quality in the country. It’s also been an interesting evolution in terms of the trends for processing and varietals being produced. A lot of what we see now is an answer to that exposure of a globalized market that emerged as a consequence of the program. 

As these dynamics pushed for the creation of a new niche in what had been a stagnant industry for a long time, in the real world, the realm of the auction became mostly reserved for very wealthy producers that could afford the cost of experimenting. The small producer and the farms working for subsistence were facing a much more somber reality. 

There were severe changes that happened in the coffee being produced in Guatemala between 2012 and 2017. 

Starting with the Leaf Rust crisis, which is a fungal disease that makes a host out of coffee leaves, restricting its ability to perform photosynthesis, and therefore affecting the production of the plant –and even its survival. 

This crisis came to weaken a sector that was already struggling with pricing and a changing environment. It weakened not only the incentives to continue producing coffee, but it also weakened the coffee plants themselves. 

Perhaps the most notorious effect of a crisis started in 2013 with what I defined as The Premature Aging of Coffee. 

Our beautiful, high-scoring, high-grown coffees started fading drastically and tasting stale, old, and tired—after only a matter of months. We couldn’t understand what was going on or why. If only the most perfect cherries were picked at the height of ripeness and processed with all the care and time in the world, what went wrong?

Coffee presented a very short life cycle, between six and eight months before undergoing drastic changes: the bean’s appearance became pale and white, and presenting flavors which are not associated with old coffee, but rather with a cardboard and papery taste. Acidity and complexity faded almost completely.

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

During those years of crisis there was a significant shift in rainfall patterns in producing areas. Rainfall on the macro level remained constant in quantity, yet not in its expected timing. First rains usually come in May, and the rainy season settles between the end of July and the beginning of October.

Yet, out-of-season rains started determining the flowering patterns of coffee. With initial rains falling in January and February, an out-of-season flowering occurred. Once the coffee tree flowers, as a rule, will result in coffee harvest eight to nine months later. 

An additional shower at the end of April and mid-May will trigger a new flowering—no longer the historical main flowering, but a diminished version of the same. The traditional formal flowering of spring that would often result in the famous best coffees of the “third picking” were no longer a reality.

With the rain patterns changing, it meant there were also longer periods of time without it. These droughts happened during the period in which fertilizers are applied and critical nutrition is absorbed by the coffee trees. 

We are counting on rainfall to activate the components on these fertilizers to reach the plant, yet these remain on the hot ground, often lost due to evaporation. The opportunity to feed the plant and give density to the coffee is lost during the entire critical part of the  growth cycle.

Rain that triggers coffee’s final nutrition started falling out of season as well, during October and November. These are months in which we don’t historically experience rain. 

When the rains finally came, what was found on the ground was often the fertilizer that didn’t evaporate with the sun, formulas that contain higher doses of elements needed at the final stage of cherry maturation. The result is an accelerated final ripening of the cherry without going through proper development of sugars. 

The cumulative result of these factors is an out-of-season harvest in which the peak of production is experienced in December rather than in March. The plant is still bearing at that point the production triggered by the April and May flowerings that won’t ripen until February or March when the plant is already exhausted, and often bearing new fruit because another cycle of out-of-season rains. 

The final picking—if not sacrificed and picked green to prevent additional stress on the plant—often lacks all necessary elements of nutrition. 

During the last few days I tasted the Top 30 lots from Cup of Excellence for Guatemala. All the coffees were exceptional and worthy of the auction and I could tell there has been a lot of dedication and love involved in their production. 

As the barometer for interpretation on what we are currently valuing as the standard of quality what the lineup for this year’s auction tells me is that things have changed. Drastically. 

The way we came out of the crisis reflects a very safe series of decisions. There has been a change in the way coffee is processed, so that the process is what presents the quality and not the inherent quality of the product.

There has been a change in the type of coffee trees we’re growing. Making bets on specific varietals that present an exotic profile paired with the processing styles adopted, and at the same time making bets on varietals that are less susceptible to the climatic and fungal variations. 

There has been a seemingly standardized way tweaking the way these coffees need to be crafted to fit a certain expectation of taste, which is obtained with specific recipes for the way it's roasted and brewed as well. This has led to the way training for coffee tasting has been adapted to favor, above all, the most obvious aspects of taste, to the point of making the coffee that is currently trending similar even when coming from different countries and regions. 

My main takeaways from the 2020 lineup for the auction is having experienced a very exciting and complex series of coffees; and realizing that, the ability coffee has of being a reflection of the place it comes from and the people who produce it, is starting to be neglected. 

My fear is that the next step will be further standardization in the name of market opportunities and higher prices. Diversity in profiles of taste will have a tendency to become homogeneous regardless of where coffee is grown.