After two full days of driving around the San Francisco Bay Area and immersing themselves in all things coffee, four Nicaraguan coffee growers and one coffee-growing daughter looked tired--very tired. The truth came out every time the driver--who spends most of his time moonlighting as a writer for a certain specialty beverage magazine--glanced in the rearview mirror. Miguel Gómez and Roberto Bendaña had let their heads fall backward onto the van seat, and were gazing at the gray cloth skies above them. Erwin Mierisch sat with his eyes half-closed, looking at nothing in particular. And Eddy and Karen Kühl--they weren't asleep, but they weren't altogether there either.
The night before, they had hosted a reception for Bay Area coffee professionals and the
local Nicaraguan community at the San Francisco Maritime Museum. Afterward, they had done
what people visiting San Francisco are prone to do at night--they enjoyed themselves. The
reception had followed a busy nine hours of running around San Francisco and Oakland,
visiting what seemed like every coffee-related business in a 30-mile radius. The growers
had also attended the Specialty Coffee Association of America (SCAA) trade show in Denver,
Colo., just a few days earlier.
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It was now the final afternoon of a three-day tour of the Bay Area coffee
industry, and the growers were visiting the Napa Valley to learn about wine appellation
systems. Although tired, they did learn quite a bit about wine cultivation. First, they
discovered that the Napa Valley and Sonoma is where the serious U.S. wineries hold court.
Everything about the area exudes wealth, especially when one learns that Francis Ford
Coppola, Walt Disney's daughter, the founders of Atari, and the much-worshipped Swanson
family--manufacturer of TV dinners--all own vineyards in the area. Wine makes a good hobby
for the seriously rich. John Crossland, president of Vineyard Professional Services, also tutored the Nicaraguans on wine agriculture--how trees are pruned, what makes good soil, how much rainfall wine plants need. The tour discovered firsthand that just because Napa is in California, it doesn't mean a hard rain won't fall. |
Finally, they learned a few details about appellation law. The last stop of the Bay Area coffee tour was at Cakebread Vineyards, a well-known Napa vineyard with a beautiful guest house ideal for feasting on elaborately prepared food and drink. Why should a coffee tour wrap up at a winery? Because coffee and wine share many similar agricultural characteristics--chief among them that wines and coffees grown under a variety of conditions produce a variety of flavors. The big difference is that wine growers across the world have spent decades trying to implement appellation systems that protect the quality and marketing integrity of their best wines. A Burgundy wine, under a controlled appellation, must be grown in the Burgundy region of France and cultivated under pre-determined conditions. Coffee producing countries, on the other hand, have never established true appellation systems.
If these Nicaraguan growers have their way, that will change. Bendaña and Gómez hold important positions within the Nicaraguan coffee industry as the executive secretary of the Nicaraguan Coffee Commission and vice president of the Nicaraguan Specialty Coffee Association respectively. Eddy Kühl owns Selva Negra, the most famous coffee farm in the country. And Mierisch, in addition to owning three farms that have been in his family for generations, also owns a growing coffee export business.
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Two different climates, two different soils, two different coffees. And that's really what the idea of appellation is all about. "These two farms produce coffees of totally different taste and appearance," says Gómez. "The appellation system is the way to go," Gómez explained later. "It will provide our customers with more information regarding the agro-ecological conditions where the coffee is grown, and the market will have a more differentiated product and production based on the quality of the cup and long-term sustainability."
Appellation was just one of many concepts discussed during the three-day trip to the Bay Area, the first part of which was chronicled in the July '98 issue of Fresh Cup. The purpose of the trip was twofold--to promote Nicaraguan coffees to Bay Area coffee companies and to educate Nicaraguan farmers about the United States specialty coffee industry. But both of those objectives ultimately pointed to a larger goal--to strengthen an industry that has proved to be one of Nicaragua's most durable yet unsteady and make it the foundation of the country's post-revolution economy.
Whether Nicaragua will succeed in becoming the premier producer of specialty coffees in Central America--as so many roasters think it has the potential to be--will be determined by the dedication of farmers who want to grow good coffee and promote it to the rest of the world. As long as Nicaraguan farmers stay focused on the specialty coffee industry in the U.S. and beyond, the Nicaraguan industry is looking at a fruitful future. Here are other highlights of the three-day tour:
Green coffee is shipped from a Central American port to the Port of Oakland, where it is picked up and transported to either a roaster's warehousing facility or a larger mega-warehouse.
Although the Port of Oakland is an impressive sight--a massive freighter can hold hundreds of refrigerated or ambient cargo containers--nobody unloads the freighters during the coffee growers' tour. Not even government representatives from Nicaragua's most important export crop have the power to interrupt a union-mandated lunch hour.
The Port of Oakland is a monument to mass-consumerism and a visible demonstration of how much the United States depends on other countries for the lifestyle it leads. The containers found on its docks hold many different cargoes. Green coffee is probably one of the easier ones to ship. It won't bruise when it gets jostled, it doesn't spoil easily and it doesn't need to be refrigerated. (Frozen or cooled products are shipped in containers with giant penguins painted on the outside. They're called "reefers," a play off the refrigeration theme.)
The Port is an impressive sight even without watching a single container move. The containers--each the size of a semi-truck trailer--look like Lincoln Logs on the deck of their gigantic ship. It's a wonder the tremendous weight on the ships don't cause them to sink (water displacement be damned).
The one disappointment is that Sea-Land, the company that services the Port of Oakland, doesn't have much to say on coffee. It's just one of thousands of cargo loads that come through its docks. It's a mild disappointment, perhaps, but one that's easily forgotten with the pizza lunch the company provides.
This is the stop for people who value quantity. Located in Hayward, Calif., The Annex is enormous. It's a warehousing facility that moves 1.2 million pounds of green coffee per day. At any given time, the building houses between 100,000 and 200,000 150-lb. coffee bags. If you're a coffee drinker who likes burlap and big buildings, this is your kind of place. It's difficult to tell if it's a Nicaraguan coffee farmer's kind of place, however. Bendaña and company seem impressed by the size of the facility and its efficiency, but if there's one way to make a grower feel lost in the shuffle of coffee bureaucracy, it's to ask him to find his farm's coffee in a warehouse storing 150,000 bags of coffee from around the world serviced by 28 dock doors and eight rail doors. How does he make his coffee stand out among the tens of thousands of coffees that cross this threshold every month?
Annex General Manager David "Buzz" Romero has one suggestion: Find a representative in the U.S. who will call and interest roasters. In essence, hire an agent.
Another method is for farmers to promote their coffees as having more integrity than competing coffees. Any marketing advantage is a good advantage, and many Nicaraguans support the push toward sustainable agriculture. In April, the Nicaraguan minister of environment spoke at the Sustainable Coffee Conference in Denver, Colo., pledging that the entire nation would follow the SCAA's sustainability guidelines.
Each of the growers on this tour are committed to farming sustainably. Mierisch proudly boasts that each of his three farms is environmentally and socially responsible. "The wet mill [at La Alianza] is still the same one my grandfather used over 20 years ago," he says. "It's operated with a water wheel, and it's had a few modifications to make it more ecological. The whole farm is planted under a natural rainforest canopy, and we are in the process of getting an ECO-OK certification."
Mierisch says his family has built nondenominational churches and health-care clinics for workers on each farm and is in the process of building new houses for its employees. "[Our coffee is] not organically grown, but I believe we have come as close as possible without being totally organic," he continues. ... Nicaragua is ages ahead of other countries when it comes to sustainability in the coffee industry."
The Annex is the biggest coffee warehouse on the West Coast, but it's by no means the only large facility nationally. There are other huge warehouses in New Orleans, New York and other cities, in addition to hundreds of smaller warehouses where U.S. roasters store their coffees. The Annex's role is to both store and consolidate coffees for its clients. The company makes life easier for a small roaster who wants to roast Nicaraguan, Guatemalan and Kona coffees on one day and Kenyans and Ethiopians the next. Instead of sending a truck to several different facilities, the roaster can store all its coffees at The Annex.
As impressive a facility as JBR, Inc., is in San Leandro, it's difficult to appreciate any business that makes you wear hair nets while walking around a 90-degree roasting plant. JBR doesn't roast any coffee under its own name. The company sells its coffee under five separate brand names, each of which is marketed differently. San Francisco Bay Coffee Co., for instance, is sold in west coast Costco stores alongside Starbucks coffees. One of JBR's best-known lines is its East Indies Coffee and Tea line, which markets heavily to the gourmet market. World's Best & Most Exotic Coffee Co., the company's newest line, focuses on selling estate coffees to specialty coffee consumers. Each World's Best package tells the story of the estate history.
The marketing strategy of the World's Best & Most Exotic Coffee Co. isn't lost on the growers, each of whom would like to sell his coffee unblended to the U.S. gourmet market. Eddy Kühl's farm, Selva Negra, is at the head of the class in Nicaragua because of its reputation and quality. The farms of Bendaña, Gómez and Mierisch are also gaining notoriety, especially since the farmers are promoting their coffees on trips such as this one. That, combined with the farmers' dedication to improve their coffee quality, bodes well for the future of the Nicaraguan industry.
John and Pete Rogers, owners of JBR, conducted the tour with Pete's children in tow. There was something Norman Rockwellian about watching Pete's wife hold their daughter on the edge of one of the large roasters while John scooped roasted coffee out of the roasting bin for Kühl to see. Just as each of the Nicaraguan farmers have families with roots in coffee, so too does JBR's clan.
The reception for the Nicaraguan community--hosted by Kimberly Easson, president of JavaVentures, and the Nicaraguan growers themselves--drew emissaries from throughout the Bay Area to the San Francisco Maritime Museum. The Nicaraguan consulate was there, as were most of the bigwig coffee roasters in the area. Both Jim Reynolds, vice president of Peet's Coffee & Tea, and Pete Rogers from JBR won free bags of green coffee, raising the question of how large, successful coffee roasters could be so lucky as to not only roast tons of good coffee but to also get it for free (Rogers also won a hammock).
In addition to dozens of well-connected guests, the reception also featured a welcoming speech by Bendaña, a banquet dinner and a display of traditional Nicaraguan dancing.
Prior to the reception, however, was a more telling story that showed just how much Bendaña and the other growers want to successfully promote the Nicaraguan industry. Bendaña was at the hotel, looking the coffee writer up and down. He suggested that the writer change his clothes before the evening event. No problem, except the writer had no change of clothes and precious little time to run back to his friend's house for a quick shower and a wardrobe swap. So Roberto left the role of ambassador and stepped into the role of facilitator. That's a long way of saying this writer wore a dark blue business suit belonging to a high-ranking Nicaraguan official at a San Francisco reception celebrating the Nicaraguan coffee industry. It's also a way of saying that Bendaña is very savvy about presenting his country's coffee in its best light. No detail goes unnoticed, no poorly dressed scribe goes unsuited.
The ultimate goal of the Bay Area coffee tour was to promote Nicaraguan coffees to the U.S. coffee industry while giving the growers a better perspective of what roasters and consumers want.
"We found out that American gourmet consumers like arabica, big healthy beans and shade coffees with good aromas and acidity--all the things Nicaraguan coffee is known for," says Kühl, discussing the value of the Bay Area tour. "We also found the Americans are demanding preservation of our forests and good social conditions for our workers. We need to implement in force these practices in Nicaragua."
As Kühl said during the JBR tour, "Now we can give a conference on coffee. We've seen everything from harvesting to the cup."
JBR provided a fitting ending for the second day of the coffee tour, and provided a good epilogue for the entire trip. John and Pete Rogers, owners of JBR, conducted the tour with Pete's children in tow. As the farmers walked around the facility, the children acted like they belonged in a coffee roastery as much as anyone else. There was something Norman Rockwellian about watching Pete's wife hold their daughter on the edge of one of the large roasters while John scooped roasted coffee out of the bin for Kühl to see. Just as each of the Nicaraguan farmers have families with roots in coffee, so too does JBR's clan. There may be some differences between people from coffee producing and consuming countries, but there are a lot of similarities as well.
Reprinted with permission from Fresh Cup Magazine, "the Voice of the Specialty Beverage Industry." Annual subscription is $35 for 12 issues. To subscribe, call 503-236-2587, or visit the Fresh Cup website at www.freshcup.com.