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Local farmers unloading a truckload of ripe coffee cherries.
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So my first update. Where to begin?
Well, let's start with the flight out. How does someone pack for a coffee expedition? Clothes are a good thing to have. A little bit of antiseptic and band-aids. Some snacks. Passport, tickets, my mini-chess game, and business cards and I was set. My bag was small enough to bring with me on to the plane which I really like (who wants to wait around in an airport for a bag when there is so much coffee out there to try, anyways?). I took the BART (the bay area train) to the airport and from there hung out until my flight left at 11:00PM. I met a random girl on the plane who tried to smuggle her pet fish on with her. She was a consultant and was staying in San Francisco on a job and got kind of attached to her fish while she lived in a hotel there - and wanted to take him with her when she left. But the lady at the counter wouldn't let her, saying "you are not allowed to bring a cold blooded animal on the plane!", so she said she would find another airline. She returned later and checked in which a different person (with the fish secretly stowed in a bag in her jacket pocket) but before she could enter in the security area the woman from the counter before ran after her shaking and yelling, "Miss! Miss! You CAN NOT bring a cold blooded animal on the plane!!", so it got confiscated and she had to call a friend from San Jose to come pick the fish up. She was nearly in tears telling me this and I mentioned that although it was sad that she wasn't with her fish, the story was actually pretty funny. She laughed and agreed. Oh yeah, she also had narcolepsy
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Coffee cherries passing through the grate and into the receiving bay.
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so she would just fall asleep while talking to you. I could go on and on about this, but it has nothing to do with coffee - which is the purpose of this trip in the first place!
So I eventually landed in Guatemala city after a 4 hour layover in Atlanta. I changed some cash to Quitzales and hopped on a bus to the general direction of my hotel. I like taking the buses in countries I haven't been to before because you meet so many interesting people and you see the city from the perspective of the people actually living there. I got all checked into my hotel and what not and went out exploring the streets of Guatemala City. It's an interesting place. Colors everywhere. Every house is a different bright pastel color (orange, pink, blue, green, etc...) and the smells are almost overwhelming; Alternating wafts of spices, barbequed meat, exhaust, urine, fresh bread, roasting coffee, and a plethora of other scents all drift past your nose as you walk down the road and watch people going about there lives. Going to the market, taking their
kids to school, selling stuff on the street - you name it. You quickly notice two things about Guatemala. Number one is that everyone is dressed pretty nicely. Everyone looks nice and there are a few beggars here and there, but for the most part, it's quite different from many of the poor countries I've visited before in South America and Asia. The next thing you notice is that there are police everywhere. In groups on
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Every lot of coffee that passes through this plant gets sampled!
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every other street corner. Alone, patrolling the sidewalk. Driving by in cop cars. Everywhere. I asked some if it was dangerous to walk down the street and they said yes. Even in mid-day. Thieves can just pull out a gun and demand everything and people will just run away and leave you alone. They said it happens all the time. I quickly hid my camera, grabbed some food and headed back to the hotel and passed out from exhaustion. I didn't sleep on the flight and I was out of energy - a quick recharge was in order. In the morning, I got up and headed to a
really nice coffee house (excellent coffee, too!) and relaxed there for a bit. They actually sold Fresh Roast coffee roasters! I asked them if they sold green beans and they didn't understand. I asked what someone would do if they bought the coffee roaster and they said the person would have to order the green beans from them then come in and pick them up. Sounded complicated. I doubt if they ever sold any - but it had to
do with their theme: the coffee roastery (which is what it would translate to). After that I headed to Antigua. The bus ride was awesome. Nice loud Latin pop and colors. Colors everywhere - the buildings, the clothes of the people, the food for sale on the side of the streets. Really friendly people - I have yet to meet a Guatemalan who wasn't smiling or friendly. Lush trees and forest (or maybe jungle?) everywhere. It was great.
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Yours truly, keeping it real sampling coffee with my plastic cup spittoon and apron (most cuppers spit back out the coffee after they have sampled it)
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And then I finally arrived in Antigua - the land of coffee. It's just a 45 minute bus ride out of Guatemala City so it's pretty close. But it's a world of difference. Although it's still relatively dangerous, you can walk around most parts of town at night without any real danger. The army still patrols the roads though - but not to the magnitude of Guatemala City.
So where does one start? Not one to waste time, I asked the lady at the hotel I checked in to where all the coffee was. She said to head to the
beneficio. So after throwing down my stuff, I hopped in a little motor taxi and headed toward the beneficio - which is the place where they process mature coffee fruit (for farmers that don't have the facilities themselves). I arrived at the gate. This is where a fancy business card and fluency in Spanish comes in handy. Within a few minutes I was in the office of the manager. Would he show me around? Of course! He showed me where they receive the coffee fruit from the farmers (one bay for Antigua coffee, and another for the rest) and then we followed the route to the water sorting machines, to the de-pulpers, to the fermentation tanks, then over the drying platforms, then the mill and grading machines (I'll explain all these better in my next post), and then to a special quality control machine that brings in a few thousand beans at a time and measures bean density to determine which beans are bad and discards them (for sale on the cheap to the locals). We headed to the warehouse where they store the coffee before they export it and then we ended up in the tasting room, where a guy tastes every lot that goes
through the plant. He was a really friendly guy and showed me all his cool gadgets and then we did a cupping he had ready (a cupping is a professional sampling - take a look at the pictures and when I get back, I will post a video of the whole process). We talked for quite a while and I learned quite a bit. He's been sampling coffee for 26 years and sometimes has 80 different lots to try a day. Imagine that!
Joel (the Manager) told me that they would be processing a bunch of coffee cherries the next morning and that I was welcome to come back and
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After fermentation, the coffee is laid out on decks and constantly agitated in rows so it can properly dry.
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watch the whole processing process from start to finish. Sure! Before leaving, I asked if they had any samples of defect coffee. You see, the problem is that by the time I get the coffee from the importer to the US, it's usually pretty good quality, or at least doesn't have any huge defects. I really wanted to roast some and sample it so I could pick the different kinds out. They gave me a good 5 pounds of different defect coffees. We smelled one that had absorbed a soap smell from whatever sack it was in. Green coffee absorbs odors like a sponge. It's incredible. They also gave me some roasted coffee as a gift as well as another few pounds of high quality green coffee (which I will have to roast when I get back to try out).
The next day, I headed back early in the morning and watched some farmers unload their harvest. They filled the receiving bay and while we waited for the process to start (they have to get the fresh water pumps ready for the whole deal) I went back to Marco Antonio's (the pro
taster) office to sample some more coffee and chat some more. After a few hours hanging out with him and his assistant, I was told that the machines wouldn't start the processing until 2:00pm so I decided to just return the next day and hang out a bit more - sample some more coffee then treat the guys to lunch and come back to see the process. So after hitching a ride in a huge diesel coffee cherry delivery truck back to town, I'm back. Today or tomorrow I'm going to head out to the country side to check out some farms.
So my next post will have more pictures from the coffee process and a better description of Antigua (I haven't actually seen all that much as of yet). When I return, I'll put a lot more coffee info and tons of pictures of Guatemala City, Antigua, and the coffee process on the site (lots of videos too - but they are all in Spanish). Stay tuned for more cool stuff!
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The receiving bay starts filling up with ripe coffee cherries.
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The view from my personal 20-ton taxi (sure beats walking!) back into town.
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But before the coffee is sampled, the defects per 350 grams are counted and the coffee price is discounted or the lot is rejected accordingly. If it has too many defects, it may back for reprocessing until the number of defects is acceptable.
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