Specialty Coffee production is about principles, not recipes.

Lessons learned in Guatemala applied to coffee production in Brazil.

Lucca Cafes Especiais in Curitiba, Brazil.

My name is Josué Morales, and I have been working in the specialty coffee industry since 2003. 

I knew I had learned Portuguese the day I found myself running a farm in the rural area of Brazil, but before any of that happened, Love brought me to Brazil in April of 2013. I had met the love of my life and she happened to live half of the world away from where I was. 

Without going into the romantic part of the story, I want to concentrate on what it meant to me, as a coffee professional visiting Carolina in Curitiba for the first time. Like many of you, I found myself searching the map for that town the first time I heard about it. It's in this town where Carolina’s family grew and developed the concept of Lucca Cafes Especiais, the first specialty coffee roastery in Brazil. 

For years I had believed that high quality specialty coffee was something that just wasn’t produced in Brazil. Carolina taught me little by little about the amazing coffee she was sourcing for Lucca, where her mother Georgia, would roast these coffees to a level of perfection I had seldom encountered before. 

I was conflicted and intrigued at all the things I was learning at Lucca in Brazil. I was used to coffee grown at high altitudes in Guatemala, but in Brazil they were grown at high latitudes, having light exposure and atmospheric pressure as a determining factor to their taste. 

It was at Lucca that I first met Marco Cravo, a coffee producer from North Paraná, with whom we became friends. We would often have coffee together in the afternoons while Carolina worked with her mother. As our friendship grew I became more curious about the coffee he produced. 

Marco seemed very disappointed about his coffee and his farm. He described to me North Paraná as having the worst reputation for quality in Brazil because of its risk of frosts, its low temperatures and its latitude. This was a place where coffee production was different to the rest of Brazil. 

In North Paraná the coffee trees flower multiple times because of scattered rains, so ripening on the trees does not happen in a uniform way. It rains during harvest, the soil is very old and very fertile, but that also makes it very muddy and complicated to navigate. One thing after another he was describing more the reality of what I was used to experiencing in Guatemala. I was intrigued. 

Marco Cravo and Josue Morales at Fazenda Pilar. January 6th, 2015.

During my second visit to Curitiba we coordinated a visit to Marco at Pilar, I wanted to see for myself what coffee farms looked like in Brazil, especially one in a region so complicated. 

Fazenda Pilar is 180 times larger than the farm where I produce coffee in Antigua Guatemala. 

I could barely grasp the dimension of things the first time I visited. However that did not stop me three years later when Marco gave me the opportunity to implement my system in a place where absolutely everything was different to what I was used to. 

The premise was the following: arrive at Fazenda Pilar to do something extraordinary. It was June 2017 when it finally happened. It was a race against time, if I couldn’t prove that the farm had the potential of producing high quality coffee that could sell for better prices, it would be converted into soy and corn plantations that were more profitable. 

I had arrived late, there were only ten days of harvest left, and the worst portion of coffee was the only thing left to harvest. 

I remember driving straight to the farm upon landing in Brazil. I had been traveling for over thirty straight hours, jet lagged, dirty, and tired from all the travel. Crossing the gate I had already noticed the mistakes that were being made in the drying patio. It was noon when I arrived, and after having lunch with the staff it took me the remainder of that day and night to turn that farm completely upside down. 

Fazenda Pilar has an impressive infrastructure and I was determined to take it to the limit. There is a machine for everything in Brazil, different to Guatemala where most of everything done is still manual labor. 

I had a crew of ten people to work with. They understood during the first few hours of our interactions the urgency involved in creating a completely different parameter of quality to the one they had been taught. 

Josue Morales (far right) and The Crew at Fazenda Pilar. June 30th, 2017.

In the course of the following two weeks the guys at Fazenda Pilar and I experienced some of the most intense and extraordinary days I’ve had in my career as a coffee professional. The learning curve that this team endured during those days encapsulated the knowledge from everything I had learned in the prior fourteen years of my life. 

I was there to achieve quality, and to make history. 

In Brazil quality meant the way the processes are organized, it meant efficiencies in the process, it meant yields and volumes obtained from the intensive farming of the land. Quality is synonymous with the standardization on how coffee should be produced to obtain a homogeneous product, instead of one that is unique. 

Brazilian coffee production answers in essence to the necessary behavior to produce a high volume commodity, and in the minds of most producers, coffee is just another crop to make revenue off the land, no different to corn, or soy, or cattle. 

From the point of view of efficiency, the work of this farm is impeccable. In a farm whose only focus were high yields and efficiencies, the transformation to achieve the production of high quality specialty coffee was almost impossible. The reason being that the process of quality is more than often a process that is counter intuitive. 

The installed capacity of a factory is determined by the output of its slowest machine or process. I often say that the people who build the machines for coffee processing are really good at making machines, but really bad at understanding coffee. When the right processes are placed in the right line of priority, the factories that were once thought to have excess capacity become constrained and cannot produce the output that was thought to be possible. 

Coffee harvesting in Brazil is done with machines and not by hand. The nature of the size of plantations in Brazil requires the harvest process to be this way because all the coffee often ripens at similar intervals. 

The size of the beast wasn’t what scared me, I was used to managing similar volumes inbound into Beneficio La Esperanza in Antigua Guatemala every night. What worried me was the fact that we were adding one additional process that is not part of the coffee culture in Brazil. The process of fermentation. 

The norm in Brazil is that, as the coffee harvesting machines make their way through the fields, coffee is collected in containers. As these containers become full they are taken to the place where they empty the coffee cherries to be processed and dried. This is done one at a time. 

In the process of fermentation coffee from one day’s picking shouldn’t be added to the tank where it ferments at different intervals, it should all progress at the same pace. So instead of having the whole day to process one container at a time, the first thing I changed was that all coffee picked in the day was to be processed at the same time. 

What seemed to be a very capable processing area became a bottleneck, and instead of having a normal schedule we were working 24 hours a day. 

The washing station at Fazenda Pilar.

Brazil has very strict labor laws and Marco at Fazenda Pilar is very strict about the way in which these laws are enforced at farm level. Everyone is treated and paid very well, they are provided with housing, meals, and are asked to work the hours they are hired for and only that. So the system I was bringing to the farm was inconceivable! 

This did not stop me. I had ten days, and the first one was over, there was no time to do things any other way. I let Marco figure out how to run a very expensive system of extra hours.

In the meantime, I carried on. That night, as the first batch of coffee flowed into the tank where it would be fermented for the next day or two, the whole team had become completely invigorated with the prospect of experimenting something new and different to everything they had tried before. 

The first day had been warm and sunny and a complete success, on the second day, things started to get weary with North Paraná behaving the way it has to. It was winter and we were below the tropic of Capricorn. A cold front came in. 

By the afternoon of the third day I had adapted the principles of my system to fit the conditions at Fazenda Pilar. I didn't just come to implement whatever process I was doing in Guatemala, I had invented a system that answered to the needs of this region. A new way to wash the coffee from the process of fermentation. 

The day we washed the first lot and placed it out on the patio it was pouring rain. 

I could see the faces of panic in everyone around me as rain falling on coffee was said to be its major recipe for disaster. It wasn’t. We continued through the rainy days and into days that temperature dropped to almost freezing. 

There was not a single cloud in the bright blue sky with a blazing Sun that wouldn’t warm up at all. Drying was immediately adapted to continue in mechanical dryers, and we continued to focus on the volume coming in.

Machine for the mechanical harvesting of coffee. Fazenda Pilar.

The mechanical pickers were sliding because of mud out in the fields, but the harvesting needed to continue to save the remaining ripe coffee cherries, especially after the rain.

It had been nine days since I arrived at Fazenda Pilar by the time we got to try the first finished lot of coffee produced with my system. The coffee looked, felt, and tasted like no coffee we had ever tried, it was something new. 

I interpreted that tasting as the first time we were actually tasting the coffee of North Paraná the way it should be, expressing the natural qualities the region has to offer. 

That coffee went on to be recognized as the best in the region that year, and to be chosen as the official coffee for the Brazilian Roasting Competition. 

As I flew back to Guatemala I reflected on my days at Fazenda Pilar. Far from being a mission accomplished, we had barely started to scratch the surface.

How I became a coffee producer.

The historical circumstances that shaped a region, and myself.

The Valley of Antigua Guatemala. Framed by the Agua, Fuego and Acatenango Volcanoes.

My name is Josue Morales and I have been in the coffee industry since 2003. It was back then, in the summer of 2003, when I first held a fist full of coffee seeds that would become my first purchase.

When I was choosing, or rather guessing what to choose to purchase for my first bag of coffee, I was boldly trying to look like someone who knew what he was doing. I didn’t. I could feel the shame running down my spine.

I was being asked if I wanted Pergamino or Oro which are the two terms used to trade coffee in the internal market of Guatemala. Pergamino refers to the coffee that still has an outer protective skin, the one we call parchment in English. Oro is the name it receives after the parchment is removed and the seed has been cleaned and prepared to be either roasted or exported.

I nervously answered “pergamino” because it was the cheaper option. Little did I know that it still needed further cleaning before I could roast it, and that it loses an average of twenty to twenty two percent in weight when removing the skin.

This took place in Huehuetenango, during a University project. The main reason why I bought that bag of coffee was that I wanted to take back with me something that would remind me of that semester I spent there. At that point, I hadn’t even the slightest idea if this could be a sound business to pursue.

The one hundred pounds I bought ended up being roughly 64 pounds of roasted coffee. I kept some to drink at home and gave away the rest to some of my teachers and some to friends of my parents.

A friend of my parents called me up some weeks later and told me she loved the coffee and would like to purchase thirty pounds of ground coffee from me.

That was my Aha! moment.

I asked the people I had met in Huehuetenango to send me another “quintal” of coffee, which is the name we give to a one hundred pounds bag. They couldn’t. They didn’t have any coffee left. This is how I learned that the coffee from each harvest is usually sold all at once.

Coffee in “Pergamino” to the left and “Oro” to the right.

By chance, my family had a friend who owned a coffee farm in Huehuetenango. I called him and asked if he had any coffee left, I explained to him that I needed only a small stock, that I would like to roast it and sell it. Fortunately, he did have some coffee and he was willing to save it for me.

His name is Alejandro Solís, owner of Finca Huixoc in Huehuetenango. He became my first direct relationship in the coffee business. From that moment on, I have purchased his coffee every single year without interruption. This is the moment that marked the beginning of the times I describe in my previous article What does specialty coffee mean to me?

Finca Huixoc was founded in 1947 by don Alejandro’s grandfather, becoming the first coffee farm in the region of Huehuetenango. This is one of the most remote areas in my country, Guatemala. Back when this farm was founded, they were blowing up the mountains with dynamite to build the roads to bring in the machinery that would process the coffee at the farm. Those very same machines are still running and processing coffee at this farm until today.

This region is blessed with high altitudes and very specific rain patterns. Because it’s very mountainous, it creates a wide variety of micro-climates that allow for the profile of coffee to have a very important acceptance in the taste preference of consumers.

During the first nine years of my career, I concentrated most of my efforts in growing with the coffee from this region as my flagship. It took me years to make the friendships that would take me from one corner of the mountains to another. 

One farm owner would introduce me to the neighbor, and their neighbors in turn would introduce me to the communities of small shareholder producers. Then these producers would introduce me to the leaders of their communities, and so on. Eventually, that’s how I ended up helping to create many cooperatives in the Huehuetenango area.

Alejandro Solis and Josue Morales at Finca Huixoc. March, 2014.

This region was a good place to start but it was still an emerging region in the history of coffee from Guatemala. When I started traveling to meet the roasters with whom I worked, it was notorious that the consummate leader of Guatemalan coffee was the Region of Antigua Guatemala.

I spent the summer of 2011 in Los Angeles, California, with the purpose of understanding the trends that were emerging for Specialty Coffee in the United States. I must have walked the entire city going from one coffee shop to another. I must have visited multiple times every coffee business in the city. I had taken hundreds of coffee samples that I would deliver at each one of these businesses.

I was able to experience as a customer the businesses whose names would give meaning to some of my most treasured friendships in years to come. But during that summer it was a very different story. I came back to Guatemala having sold no coffee at all.

However, I had learned a few things. First, that the coffee market was in a critical moment where interesting things were about to happen. Second, that I had drank more coffee from Antigua Guatemala in those three months than in all my life prior to that trip. Coffee from this region was the main constant everywhere I went.

Antigua Guatemala has a special place in the history of coffee because for over a hundred years it was synonymous with high grown and high quality coffee produced in Guatemala.

One hundred years ago, coffee wasn’t produced on the volcanoes or the high mountains of the country. The production was concentrated in the more fertile lowlands in the South Pacific area of Guatemala or in the Caribbean Basin that stretches into the rainforest in the region of Cobán.

The first coffee seeds that came to Guatemala were planted by the Jesuit missionaries in the courtyard of the Compañía de Jesús in the center of Antigua. These coffee plants were ornamental and would remain there for decades until some of their seeds were used to start a small coffee plantation right outside where Guatemala City would be founded many years later.

Coffee became the official agricultural strategy for Guatemala in 1871 and by 1880 it was the main crop being produced. Production became widespread primarily in the areas of the Bocacosta or the region formed between the Pacific Ocean and the chain of Volcanoes, with lands characterized by being flat, lower in altitude and extremely fertile, as opposed to the mountainous and volcanic areas where most of the indigenous population was relocated for being lands considered inappropriate for coffee production.

The Valley of Antigua Guatemala was a different story because of its vast extension of very fertile land that is flat. The strategic position between the volcanoes of Agua, Fuego and Acatenango create the perfect weather conditions for coffee to thrive at altitude.

During the period of time when coffee was pushed as a national agenda, Antigua became the most notorious for its high quality coffee, because its altitude gave it a stronger, more complex, and more expressive cup taste than the coffee being produced in low or mid altitude.

In the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, the coffee from Guatemala was already being recognized and awarded for its cup quality in Europe and in the United States. The coffee from Antigua Guatemala remained as the leading standard for this quality throughout the twentieth century.

The culture for this quality was so embedded in the culture of the industry that, even twenty years ago, professional coffee tasters would categorize a coffee that presented a certain profile of acidity and complexity as being “Genuine,” a nickname for exceptional cups among coffee professionals inspired by the fact that Antigua became one of the first coffee growing regions in the world to have a protected denomination of origin called “Genuino Antigua.”

The Brown and Yellow areas mark where coffee was initially cultivated in Guatemala during the 1800's.

With the emergence of specialty coffee roasters in the United States, buyers from Peet’s and Starbucks, and many others that followed during the 1980’s and 1990’s gravitated towards this famous coffee region by default. It was no coincidence that almost all the Guatemalan coffee I found during the time I spent in Los Angeles came from Antigua.

It was obvious to me that if I wanted to grow my business and to succeed in the United States, I had to become part of the Region of Antigua.

Contrary to the rest of the country where small producers grow and process their own coffee having the autonomy to sell it as a somewhat finished product to the best bidder, the Region of Antigua is composed of historic Estates that have had a very well established market for generations.

The small producers that do exist in the region of Antigua sell their coffee in cherry, or ripe off the trees, to the established farms that further process and export them. So in this dynamic there was little to no interest in my business proposal for traceability. The prices being paid to any farm in Antigua were already among the highest of any producing region in the world.

I had been wishing to work with coffee from Antigua for years. I was aware of the historical significance of the region. But it was only after my complete failure to connect with the market in the United States that I understood the weight this region has before the eyes of the industry. It was only then that my wish became a necessity.

I started looking immediately. The number of Estates in Antigua is very small. I knew by name each and every one of the doors that I had to knock on. They would receive me and they would listen to me and they would treat me with great kindness. But they had no interest in working with me. Their businesses were already consolidated, from generations ago. I needed them badly. They didn’t need me at all.

This went on and on. No matter how many times I asked, or how hard I tried, the answer would always be the same because I had nothing new to offer. I was discouraged. More and more discouraged every time. Frustrated almost to the point of giving up.

Then, any given afternoon in the middle of 2013, having a personal conversation with a fellow exporter, he asked me a very peculiar question: If there was one thing that would have the greatest impact on the success of my company, what would this one thing be? I spit it out without even thinking about it: Coffee from Antigua!

It turned out that his company owned this little farm right outside of Antigua. It wasn’t much, but he would let me use it, if I wanted to. Of course I wanted to! We coordinated the visit.

The farm was very small, indeed. The grass in the central courtyard was as tall as my waist. The place looked battered and time worn. The soil looked like a sand box. Not even weeds were growing. The shade trees were being replaced because they were dead and coffee was to be replanted after collapsing during the leaf rust crisis.

Beneficio La Esperanza at sunrise. Antigua Guatemala. January, 2020.

Behind the farm was a “wet mill,” a factory to process coffee cherries. There were about a dozen trucks half dismantled parked in the driveway, multiple rusting machines and pipes lying around. Inside the buildings lay a dormant and half abandoned factory for coffee processing with one of the largest installed capacities in the country.

It looked and felt faded, like a ghost town. The day was gray and rainy by the time I left.

I had been working in coffee for ten years by the first time I set foot at Beneficio La Esperanza.

Upon seeing it for the very first time, I knew this was the place that would define my career, my success, and who I would become.

I didn’t find this place; the place found me. From one day to another, it made me a Coffee Producer in the Region of Antigua Guatemala.

How coffee growing in the center of Taiwan changed my life for good

Ancient knowledge challenged my notion of what plants are.

The City of Taipei, Taiwan.

My name is Josué Morales and I have been in the coffee industry since 2003. In 2011, during one of my visits to the City of Taipei, in Taiwan, I learned a lesson that would permanently change the way in which I grow my coffee. 

I can describe my first visit to Taiwan in two words: cultural shock. 

This visit made such a long lasting impact on me that, if any given night I close my eyes, I can clearly see the colorful lights of the Linjiang Street Night Market, near the Taipei 101 building. This is where I experienced some of the most bizarre foods I’ve ever seen. 

From deep fried battered duck heads that are sold with the long neck inserted into a stick, to the unmistakable smell of the stinky tofu that announces itself from half a block away. This is where I tasted some of the strangest foods I’ve ever tasted. Even foods that at first sight appear to be very similar to Western foods are not only different but completely unfamiliar. 

My sole purpose of this visit was to sell coffee. 

By that time, I was convinced that I was producing Specialty Coffee of outstanding quality in Guatemala. For that reason, it was obvious to me that hoards of roasters would come running to throw their money at me. Turns out, that didn’t happen. 

For starters, I was used to going to trade shows in the Western World. Specialty Coffee Trade Shows, where I would stand out because I was producing High Altitude Organic Coffee in Guatemala and I had strong relationships with producers through my traceability programs. 

Things were different in Taiwan. The trade show that I went to was not exactly a Specialty Coffee Trade Show. It was a Beverage Trade Show that consolidated Tea, Coffee and Wine. My coffee, the very special product that I was so proud of, was to this audience just another beverage.

I had fallen under the spell of what I now call the Chinese Fairy Tale, or the idea that because the economies of the Asian countries are so dynamic, especially China, that they are dying to consume whatever is placed in front of them. Turns out, they are not. 

The vast majority of the Asian population has a very strongly rooted culture of drinking tea, not coffee. The coffee that is so dear to my heart was for them nothing more than a curiosity, perhaps a souvenir. 

And then, I met Van Lin. 

Van Lin is the owner of a coffee shop and consulting company in Taipei called GaBee, which means “coffee” in Taiwanese, and the man who introduced me to a very different definition of Specialty Coffee that blew my mind. 

The very first beverage he ever served me at GaBee was one of his signature drinks which involve espresso, brewed coffee, frozen grapes and Pop Rocks candy. The drink is a revolution to the senses, as you sip you get the acidity of the grapes, the taste of the coffee and immediately the shock of the candy popping in your mouth. 

This was an awesome heresy to me! 

Van Lin and Josue Morales at GaBee. November 2011.

I came from a world where Specialty Coffee had everything to do with the coffee itself, brewed in a way that would reveal its origin, and explained in the context of its traceability. And here was this guy who had built a very successful business around the concept of messing around with the taste of the coffee! 

Every aspect of the taste that would reveal its origin was lost in the process –on purpose! And he was not alone. The whole industry –incipient at that time– was doing exactly the same. I was perplexed. 

Van later explained to me the importance that rituals have in their culture. How they were much more focused on the experience than in the coffee itself. What they valued the most was a taste that would reveal the process, rather than its origin. From this point of view, coffee is not a finished product; it’s only an ingredient. 

The standards of taste from the Western World meant nothing here. It was all about perfecting the rituals around a completely new interpretation of the craft. 

Van has always been restless in the pursuit of being at the forefront of innovating and perfecting these rituals. He was the first Latte Art Champion in Taiwan, and became famous for inventing the technique of pouring milk into a latte in the form of a swan. He has also published many books about coffee pairing as an ingredient in cocktails and other beverages.

One day, a peculiar crowd of people spontaneously gathered at GaBee. A multicultural gathering from Tokyo, Hong Kong, UK, the USA, and myself, from Guatemala. These were people who were coffee professionals like me, and we were all there because we had heard about this place and wanted to experience it firsthand. 

We went out to have lunch together. I remember having some of the spiciest food that I’ve ever eaten. I also remember how easily and naturally a sense of community and genuine friendship was born among us, around the love for coffee, and congregated around the magic of GaBee.

This friendship with Van Lin also led me to learn about a community of coffee producers in the province of Tainan, in the center of Taiwan. Something I would remember later on, during my most desperate search for answers to the Leaf Rust Crisis we were living back home. 

The Leaf Rust, as I have explained in a previous article [What does Organic Coffee mean to me?] is a fungal disease that makes a host out of coffee leaves, restricting their capacity to perform photosynthesis, thus affecting coffee production and even the survival of the plant.

I spent months trying to find a way to go visit the producers in Tainan. I was convinced that going to one of the most isolated coffee production areas on the planet would allow me to learn something new. 

First, I needed a translator for the trip. This was finally arranged for me by the Guatemalan Embassy in Taiwan. Then, I needed the producers to actually accept to host me. I traveled to Taiwan without the certainty that this would happen, finally coming all together a day before I had to fly back home. 

The visit was to be hosted by the Growers Association of Taiwan. It was a surprise for them that a foreigner wanted to visit their fields. It was a surprise for me that there had never been a coffee producer from another country who had ever requested to visit them. For this reason, they didn’t have a protocol in place to receive a foreign visitor. I insisted so much that they created one for me. 

As I sat in the fast train that goes from Taipei to Tainan in only two hours, I anxiously went over and over the questions I wanted to ask these producers. Taiwan is an island. Coffee had been brought there by a Japanese Emperor back when the Island was controlled by Japan, over a hundred years ago. 

Two hours later and an hour’s drive and we were sitting at the office of one of the associations. They had an elaborate reception according to their custom, with many greetings and many protocols that I am very grateful for. But that was not what I was looking for. 

Right before leaving, by mere accident, I found the first clue that would later lead me to what I was really looking for. I wandered into a room where the fertilizer they use was being portioned to be distributed to the members of the group and I was able to snap a picture of the bag with its formula on it. Then we left. 

It was pouring rain and it was starting to be used as an excuse not to take me to the mountains. But I needed to go to the mountains. I wanted to see and touch the coffee trees. This was one of the main reasons why I had made it all the way to that point. The uncomfortable combination of my stubbornness and their hospitality ended up leading my hosts to agree to take me to the mountains.

Coffee plantations in Tainan, Taiwan. November 18, 2014.

As we drove up the hills, all I could make out were these tall shrubs shaded by palm trees. I grew impatient and disappointed. I feared that I wasn’t being taken to see what I wanted to see. 

I hopped off the car. I was blowing steam. Frustration was creating even more clouds inside my head. Were we here to drink coffee? Were we here for more meetings? Were we here for more protocols? That was absolutely not what I was looking for. 

As we walked towards the canopy, I was hit by yet another surprise. Those tree-like shrubs were actually the coffee trees that I was so desperately looking for. I didn’t recognize them before because of the idea of what a coffee shrub is in my head. These were actual trees that produced coffee. They were very tall and very wide. It made sense, I thought. They had been growing here for a hundred years. Coffee has changed a lot during that span of time, even in the way the plants look.

As I came near one of these trees I was surprised, relieved and anxious to see that even with its staggering size it seemed to be very healthy, and productive, and bearing a lot of coffee cherries. When I finally reached for one of the branches and was able to turn around one of the leaves, I could feel the pulsations in my veins. There was rust on the leaf. 

How in the world did it get here? In this place, in an island, in a coffee growing region that was completely isolated from all others, in a coffee region whose only foreign visitor up to that day had been me?

The protocols of the reception and the visit needed to happen. We ate lunch on a terrace on the side of a river, surrounded by coffee trees, and under the pouring rain. Food was memorable and plentiful. The experience was magnificent. But I had questions. 

With the help of my translator, I established fluid communication. But when I finally got to the part when I asked the questions, she stalled. I was trying to ask questions that were too technical and too specific. It was evident that she was doing her best, but she wasn’t getting the message across. I wasn’t being understood, and I was running out of time.

Out of impatience, I started drawing on a piece of paper, as an aid to communication. But that still wasn’t enough. Hours had gone by and I was still not being understood.

Mr. Chen and I, at one of the warehouses for the Taiwanese Coffee Growers Association. 2014.

In essence, all I wanted to know was how were their coffee trees so vigorous despite the rust? How come they hadn’t lost their leaves despite having the leaf rust? Why were they so productive despite having the leaf rust? 

As a last resort, out of pure despair, I took out my camera and showed them the picture of the bag of fertilizer that I had snapped before. 

That sparked deliberation among them. A lot of deliberation. To the point that I was sure that I had offended them. 

I waited in expectation. 

Finally, Mr. Chen, the leader of the group, took me out into the fields. As he was doing this, he explained to me that it wasn’t about the formula of the products they use, but the way they use them to interact with the plant. He then proceeded to demonstrate to me how they interact with each plant.

He went on to explain that, just as each person has needs and each person has reactions to your behaviors, also each plant has needs and each plant has reactions to your behaviors.

Each plant is alive, as an individual and as part of a community. 

Nurturing that life is about guiding it the right way, not about forcing it to produce. By feeding it the right things to properly develop its strength, not force feeding it with all the fertilizers available. It’s about working with the plant to widen its root system, to allow for it to thrive amongst adversity. 

My mind was blown. My Western constructs and ideas had been challenged beyond repair.

These producers have the concept that they are dealing with a live organism when dealing with the coffee plants. Simple as it is, this concept changed my life for good. This concept alone made it worthwhile to overcome so many obstacles to come this far. 

I spent the rest of the afternoon asking very different types of questions. They were not technical anymore. They had to do with interaction, with communication, with caring.

I took the train back to Taipei that same evening, and went from the train station directly to the airport. I had a lot of work to do.