Coffee coffee everywhere...and not a drop to drink

On January 3, we travelled to the town of Matagalpa, certainly much different from the quaint colonial cities we'd seen earlier but located in a beautiful valley, mountain hillsides rising from the town edges. These surrounding mountains are home to many coffee plantations and processing plants and we were eager to learn more about the roots of our and Seattle's obsession. A lovely man in Matagalpa's coffee museum accompanied us to the offices of CECOCAFEN (www.cecocafen.com) to begin. CECOCAFEN is a coffee cooperative representing over 1900 small-scale farmers working in this region of Nicaragua. These cooperatives were formed when the Sandinistas implemented land reform in the 80's. When the Sandinistas lost power in 1990, many cooperatives joined together to improve their access to markets and provide social services and technical assistance to their members. CECOCAFEN works for fair trade, social change, and to improve the quality of life for farmers and their families. They do things such as teach farmers about organic farming techniques and develop money-making ecotourism opportunities for students and travellers like us. Chicagoans will be happy to know that Intelligentsia Coffee buys from CECOCAFEN farms. Owner Jeff Watts was actually in town when we were, visiting with the farmers. Apparently Starbucks is developing a new policy about fair trade purchasing and would like to purchase from CECOCAFEN but are still in negotiations.

While in Matagalpa, we had the opportunity to visit Solcafe, the cooperative member-owned dry mill used to process the coffee, and a few days later while in Esteli a little farther north, we visited the organic coffee farm of one family which had been trained by CECOCAFEN. The farm was located on the Miraflor Nature Reserve (more about this later). The Arabic coffee bushes grow to about 2 meters tall and produce red or yellow berries. According to our guide, Edwin, Arabic coffee (75% of the world's coffee is Arabic and the rest Robusto) is considered to be of higher quality and gets a better price than Robusto. Each organic plant has about 25 years of production. Coventional plants will produce more coffee berries but only have about 10 years of production. The berries are sweet, almost like a grape, and contain 2-4 coffee beans. It was amazing to learn about the amount of work that goes into producting each cup of coffee - 21 steps from the plant to cup. Here on the farm, once the berries are ripe they must be picked by hand within a few days, the beans must be extracted from the berries using a manually operated machine, then soaked in water to rinse natural minerals and impurities, and partially dried before being driven in small truck loads over incredibly rough roads to the processing plant.

Coffee bushes and banana tree


Washing the coffee beans on the farm


At the Solcafe processing plants, we were given a personal tour by the head of operations. Sacks of coffee beans are brought to the plant by farmers to be measured, rated (for color, aroma, percent of imperfections, etc.), dried, sorted, and packed for exportation. Again the entire process is incredibly worker- and time-intensive. During the processing season from October to March, Solcafe employs over 500 workers. Each sack of coffee beans is spread out on cement drying patios (separated from the beans of other sacks) and manually raked and turned 8 times per day until it is dried to 12% humidity.

Unloading beans at Solcafe


It was quite interesting to learn what goes into making a cup of joe and really drove home the responsibility we have to purchase and consume organic fair trade coffee. One sad thing was that even though we are travelling in the countries that produce some of the world's best coffee (Nicaragua has won the award for the Cup of Excellence for the past 3 years), all of the high quality coffee is exported and it is almost impossible to find anything in restaurants and homes other than powdered instant "coffee."