Where the Wild Coffee Grows by Jeff Koehler

Author:Jeff Koehler
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

In spring 2014, Ted Stachura of Equator Coffees attended a meeting on the Google campus about a project using satellite imagery to analyze environmental changes. Stachura suggested a study that focused on coffee rust. The Google team liked the idea of looking at healthy, infected, and recovering farms and gave Stachura some criteria on size and accessibility.

Stachura is steeped in coffee. After toiling as a barista in college, he worked with the legendary Alfred Peet for a dozen years before joining Kenneth Davids at his coffee consultancy and powerful Coffee Review. Five years ago Equator hired Stachura as their director of coffee. Still, he was unable to think of one of Equator’s regular partners that fit the criteria for analysis. He asked Sustainable Harvest’s founder David Griswold for ideas, and Griswold recommended Finca El Valle.

The Google project didn’t go ahead, but it began Equator’s relationship with the farm. Stachura sampled and then bought some of their harvest.

When Finca El Valle was hit by both rust and medical misfortune, Stachura suggested a Kickstarter campaign to help fund the replanting. Sustainable Harvest facilitated it and produced a short video for the page. The goal was twenty thousand dollars. With a hundred-dollar pledge, the farm could plant twenty-five coffee trees or treat twenty rust-impacted ones. Rewards included roasted coffee from Equator and Batdorf & Bronson, beefy, rodeo-style belt buckles, and even a trip to Antigua to visit the finca.

The campaign opened in October 2104 with a few small pledges before Allegro Coffee, the specialty roaster owned by Whole Foods that had bought from Finca El Valle, made the maximum one of five thousand dollars. “This woman-owned family farm needs help to recover from illness at the farm and the devastation of roya,” it wrote on its Facebook page.44 Donations then stalled.

When Stachura heard the goal, he had worried that it was too ambitious. If the amount was not reached, none of the money would be paid. Equator decided to chip in five thousand dollars, knowing that the closer to the goal, the easier it would be to get the remaining funds. That got the momentum going, and with just a day left, the campaign crossed over its target. Griswold flew to Antigua to present Cristina with an oversize check for $21,464.

Rather than replanting with newer, hardier coffee varieties, ones that were more rust resistant or even higher yielding, the González family decided to use their own stock, raised in the farm’s nursery. These are “folk selections,” an unscientific collection of seeds taken from trees that perform well on the finca. It was not clear how the flavor profile would change in the cup with new varieties, and the family did not dare risk it. With its modest production even in a good year, the finca can only compete—even survive—with high-quality specialty coffee. Using heirloom Bourbon will mean significant challenges with la roya. “The whole world has quantity,” Pablo said. “The only flag we can fly is good flavor, good quality.”

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.