Journal

Micro vs Co-op

I found out quickly that there was a revolution away from cooperatives and towards micro-beneficios in Costa Rica.

Less than a decade ago there were under 40 micro mills in Costa Rica as apposed to the 300 plus micros that are in operation today. That should tell you the reality of the trend. This was my first and biggest lesson about coffee on the origin side. There are all these pros and cons for both micro and coop. One of the reasons I went down to Costa Rica in the first place was because Carlos processes his own coffee and it was one of the first things he brought up to me when we drove from the airport to home.

Yet, in the first few days of being there he took me to Coop De Dota, a coop of over 600 farmers in the Dota region that Carlos also happens to be one of. I loved it immediately because they had fantastic wi-fi, so while I was waiting for the tour to begin, I facetimed with family and friends while showing them the facility. During the tour the manager of the coop mentioned how the farmers keep the best coffee for their micros and send the rest of their coffee to the coop. This makes it very difficult for the coop to produce the best coffee and sustain themselves in the market and in my head I was wondering if he was eluding to farmers like Carlos.

During the tour we watched a short video, saw the drying beds and machines, checked out the fermentation tanks, passed the cherry drop off, hung out in the green storage, conducted a cupping, and ordered coffee in their cafe. The cupping was pretty cool; a couple of German roasters joined, Intelligentsia swag and burlap bags were all over, and the cupping lab was nice. Most of the coffee was mediocre, but two or three cups really stood out. I was starting to pick up the Costa Rican terroir at this point. After I got aquatinted with the coop and their brand I realized it on everything as we left. The influence of the coop in the town they are in was very heavy from super markets, to parks, and hardware stores.

I got a good amount of experience with both the coop and micros since Carlos does both. He used coffee from La Pastora at his micro and the coffee for Guadalupe and El Llano went to the coop, and he did this for good reason. Firstly building a beneficio is a large investment and a risky one at that. Secondly, it takes much more work, technique, and know how. Thirdly, once the coffee is ready to be sold you need to decide how/who to sell it. However, you can make more for your money at the micro and the traceability is more clear. On the other hand with the coop, you don't have as much to worry about. After the coffee has grown, ripened, and harvested all the farmer has to do is drop it off at the coop to be processed. The coop pays you part of the compensation immediately and continues to pay off the rest over time. However, the prices are a low average and your coffee, no matter what quality, gets mixed in with the other farmers in the area.

Overall I figured that while the coop could produce good coffee, the micros were making better coffee. Their practices were more articulate, diverse, and agile, while the traceability was unmatched. Because farmers could make more money and be proud of their work they build micros. It is such a gigantic risk to take due to the investment in land, equipment, labor, and sales. The coop is much more dependable, but the money isn't good and your work gets lost with others, and therefore the coop is suffering because they aren't getting as much or as good of coffee. I realized that one of the biggest barricades to micros is how to sell the coffee once it is dried.

Coffee Scene Created

Shaunte used to come to my latte art competitions not in search of coffee, but for cultural movements happening within our community.

So there she was with her awesome camera, curiosity, and kindness. I don't believe she got footage of the first one she came to and I don't think I even met her at that time, but she kept coming. Eventually, Shaunte and I got in touch and we planned to have her create a video of the next throwdown I organized.

Once she directed me to view the video on her vimeo page and I got to see her other work; I realized that she was not only curious about cultural movements in our community, but she had a talent for corralling it into a video. Needless to say, we continued to stay in touch and a few more throwdown videos came out of it. Soon enough Shaunte was looking for something deeper and straight up asked me about creating some sort of documentaries about coffee and the people that push it to new levels.

My mind started to spin with the opportunities we had with this new creative outlet. However, It feels as though, for some reason, it took us a while to get serious about it due to other priorities and conflicting schedules. In the meantime I was valuing travel and experience more and more. The more I had excursions to other cities for coffee, the more I met incredible people, and encountered amazing experiences. I started to think that I really had to have this captured and shared with others.

I'm always working on a few projects at once and over extending myself. One day, I had to stop myself, make the realization, and decide what it is that I want to focus on. After giving it a lot of thought and debate I concluded that I wanted a show, a series, a documentary about exploring coffee all over the world. I got back with Shaunte and told her that I wanted to start focusing on this project. We started to build more content at home and created our own youtube channel. After I had returned from Costa Rica, I started to think about my next big trip and new that Shaunte and Coffee Scene had to be the purpose behind it.

In order to build content and get people to realize our concept we planned to drive across the country to document the coffee culture in each city we pass. It is going to be a gigantic cry out for people to see our vision and the changing industry and cultures of the country. For the month of June, 2015 we will be on an adventure to explore what the food/beverage movements in each city have to offer. Currently we are in search for organizations that would be interested in partnering with our efforts and people and places that would like us to document their impact on the coffee scene. Until then, stay tuned!

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Purpose of Costa Rica Revealed

Day one was mind blowing in itself. To think you can get on a plane at home, something you're so used to, and a few hours later you're off that same plane and interacting with a world that you've only dreamed about.

The next thing I remember was a couple days later when Carlos took me to the fields above Don Eli Micro-beneficio at which we had already been processing hundreds of pounds of coffee out of every evening. This is part of his park named Tematica (various subjects in english) where he hopes to create a coffee themed retreat. The lot of coffee trees he brought me to at Tematic is called Chamaco after its previous owner. During the hike up the breathe taking landscape and through the fields of coffee, Carlos was telling me the story of the lot of coffee.

Carlos showing me around Chamaco, Tematica

Carlos helping me pick coffee at Chamaco, Tematica

He told me that Chamaco bought the land in the 70's and as it was popular with many farmers at that time to uproot the rainforest and plant new neat rows of a high producing and disease resistant catuai coffee variety, Chamaco decided to keep the rainforest and the 50 year old typica trees that already grew wild. When Carlos bought it from Chamaco a couple years earlier he decided to uphold the same philosophy with the land.

I'm with the coffee that I will use for barista competition

When we were walking through the field I felt so centered and I was really focused on being in the moment. The forest was so peaceful: the air. the smell, the sounds, the light. We literally had to find these wild, 100 year old typica trees growing under the canopy of the forest. The typica grew so tall and only birthed a few of these tiny cherries. Carlos sat me down deep in the field and told me that he wanted me to pick coffee from this lot, process it, and compete with it back home.

Maria Jose, Carlos' youngest, helping me pick coffee

Maria Jose helping pick at Chamaco, Tematica

Tucson, Actually

During my junior year at the business school at ASU I got a call right before class. It was one of the most random and weird phone conversation I have ever had.

Curtis at his mobile cafe in San Augustin open market — Curtis at his mobile cafe in San Augustin open market

At this time in late 2012 I just started roasting at Reserve in North Phoenix and building my reputation as an event coordinator and coffee educator. The guy that called me, Curtis, had heard about me due to my activity in the coffee community in Phoenix; but was informing me about his new cafe in Tucson. It really was more of a ramble about an event downtown that he had to get ready for and his wife wanting better coffee at the hospital she works at. Honestly, I didn't understand much of what he said besides that this guy was opening a cafe in Tucson soon.

As you can imagine I was a bit skeptical of the whole confrontation and put it on the back burner for a while. A few months later the guy contacted me again about the grand opening of his store, Stella Java. For some reason unknown to me I drove down to Tucson for a weekend to stay with this guy I have never met and help him work the bar for the first opening days. It was an orchestra of coffee carts inside a new open air market just outside of downtown and they were using a local roaster called Exo. I was pretty hyped!

I ended up falling in love with Curtis, his family, his vision, and Tucson (to some degree). I would end up returning quite frequently to stay at Curtis' house in order to help him with Stella and eventually his new project, Presta. Curtis knew he wanted to roast from the get-go and got into this perfect space sharing a building with an architecture firm. He hooked up a nice roaster, put up a nice bar with legit machines and grinders, and started to roast for Stella Java as an experimental platform. I got to come down to Tucson and teach him how to choose green coffee and roast specialty coffee. Curtis has always been a huge support and was also there for me 100% when I needed help getting ready for barista competition. Now that he is ready to go as a roaster after a few years as a store owner and very hard work we are excited for the grand opening of Presta Coffee Roasters retail store front.

Choosing the next coffee offerings with a cupping

The finished product at the roastery and store front

How I got to origin

I guess it's only fitting that my first journal post be about the first time I ever went to a coffee producing country. Epic!

Clouds rolling over a picker at La Pastora

It actually all started when I had returned from a trip to visit my grandmother, who was ill, in Israel. Before I left I had started the process of signing up for the big western barista competition in October of 2014. It would have been my first time competing, and I didn't realize that signing up for a competition slot was supposed to be one of the last things you do as a competitor. There are only a certain amount of people that can compete and its on a first come first serve basis. Due to a lack of communication with my employer at the time and my inexperience with competition I ended up on a waiting list to compete. Right when I returned, I got news that I had been given a place to compete with 3 weeks left to get ready for the big day. When I gave this news to my current employer they said that they couldn't give me the time off since I had just been in Israel for a month. Having to get ready for a very difficult competition in 3 weeks seemed to just get a lot harder and more dramatic. Long story short, I quit that job on good terms very shortly after. I just didn't understand how they wouldn't let me represent them on a national stage when I had told them before they hired me that competing was always a goal.

The most famous cafe in Tel Aviv, Israel

Enter Jeff Courson from Bodhi Leaf Coffee Traders, who I had been building a relationship with for some time and already deeply trusted. I gave him a call and explained the situation, being that I needed a coffee to use for competition and I didn't have time to taste a bunch of different samples. He came back to me with the recommendation of a Costa Rican coffee that was cupping pretty well, scoring in the high 80s and low 90s, and that they had the most information about, as well as a contact to the producer. I decided right then and there on that phone call that I would buy a bag (150lb) of it. My friend in Tucson, Curtis of Presta Coffee Roasters, happened to be getting a palate of coffee shipped to him from Bodhi Leaf that same day and so we threw my bag on his palate for me to pick up in Tucson. I instantly fell in love with the coffee and its pronounced flavors of lemon, almond, honey, and cocao. I began to craft a routine around my connection to the coffee and the information I was getting from emailing back and forth with the family that produced it. By the time I had put the routine together the family in Costa Rica invited me to stay on their farm, but I was so wrapped up in the competition that I put it in the back of my mind. It wasn't until another trip to Tucson in November which Jeff and I took that the idea of going to Costa Rica became a real thought.

Jeff and Curtis having coffee in downtown Tucson — Jeff and Curtis having coffee in downtown Tucson

My competition coffee once it got to Presta in Tucson

After our discussion on the way to Tucson and some more emailing with the Monteros, I purchased my ticket to Costa Rica for mid January which is the peak of harvest there. The main family member that I was coordinating with was Marianela, the eldest child of Carlos. I felt comfortable going down while she was there because she speaks great english and is familiar with American culture. We had both planned to get to Costa Rica on January 15th, but it turned out later that she would stay in Australia. I made sure that Carlos would pick me up from the airport and get me to the farm which I wasn't really sure of its location. Getting ready was exciting and scary at the same time. It was the topic of conversation with everyone I encountered for weeks before I left and yet there wasn't a whole lot about the trip that I was sure about. I figured I would pack light, only bringing a backpack with me, and be prepared to move around and live primitively. The day before I left I hosted a coffee tasting party with the coffee community in Phoenix to try some coffees we had all brought and to celebrate my going away. The next day I packed my little bag with my camera, laptop, 3 jeans, 5 shirts, a swim suit, 7 socks, 7 boxers, an aeropress, a scale, hand grinder, chargers, towel, toothbrush, and flip flops. I got on the plane and I was excited for my 6 hour layover in Denver where all my "coffee" friends were ready to pick me up for pizza and beer.

The coffee tasting party at Royal Coffee in Tempe — The coffee tasting party at Royal Coffee in Tempe

Pizza and beer in downtown Denver with Paul (Novo Coffee), Kevin (Huckleberry Coffee), Natalie (Huckleberry), and Elle (Amethyst Coffee) — Pizza and beer in downtown Denver with Paul (Novo Coffee), Kevin (Huckleberry Coffee), Natalie (Huckleberry), and Elle (Amethyst Coffee)

I landed at San Jose airport with my heart full. I was still wrapping my head around the support and love of my friends at home and all over the states that were excited for me. I changed about $160 into colones at the airport (which should have waited until I got to a bank) and walked out to the only curb at the little airport. It was 6am, the sun was rising, the air was windy and clean, and although I was feeling comfortable I wasn't sure what to expect, still. I had only seen one picture of Carlos and his instructions for me was to look for the guy in a sombrero. I was like,"well that narrows it down". About an hour later he pulled up in his mini-van, stepped out of the car, and after thinking every other car was him I knew for sure that this was it. I jumped in the van with no reservations and we headed into the city. Our first stop after getting to know each other briefly in the car was to Exclusive Coffees, a main exporter in Costa Rica. I was already blown away within the first two hours of getting there. I was seeing coffee getting dry milled, sorted, bagged, and put into containers. Their facility was gorgeous and they had a sweet cupping lab. Thrive Coffee Traders were taking a tour there at the same time and we got to talking about people we knew in common. The coffee we drank there was awesome and seeing bags of roasted coffee from all of my favorite roasters there was exciting. From there we drove through the small capitol city, stopped for lunch at a small cafe, and headed into the mountains for Carlos' farm. As we got closer and closer to our destination the landscape was astonishing to me and when Carlos and his son had pointed out some coffee trees growing on the side of the road I started to freak out!

Exclusive Coffee Exporter in San Jose, Costa Rica — Exclusive Coffee Exporter in San Jose, Costa Rica

The road from San Jose to Santa Maria de Dota

When we got to Carlos' house we switched cars and went into San Marcos for gas and some groceries. From there we started up the unpaved, steep, narrow, windy, and cliff hanger road up the La Pastora Hill where Carlos' coffee fields are. Besides being scared on the way up I was pleased to see the camaraderie between all the farmers. We would stop and say hello to everyone we saw on the way whether they were just hanging out by their field, driving down with a truck full of cherries, or walking up to their homes. It seemed like Carlos knew everyone and he was so happy to show me off. I was thrilled to see coffee trees everywhere and ascend into the cloudy coffee heaven which is La Pastora. Finally, we made it to his highest field where the pickers were wrapping up their day and Carlos was getting ready to take the day's haul down to his micro-mill. It was during this time that I got some of my favorite pictures that I have ever taken. Not to mention it was the first time I got to go up to a coffee tree, feel it, pick a cherry off, bite into it, taste its sweetness, and spit out the wet and slimy seeds inside. That was a revolutionary moment in my life and career. After spending some time in the serene fields, getting to know Carlos' pickers, and getting some great shots, we headed back down the mountain with the day's haul. We passed Carlos' house again by a few meters and turned onto the most rickety and narrow bridge I have ever seen in order to cross a river that is behind his house. On the other side of the river is where his micro-mill is. Jacob, Carlos' middle child, was there waiting for us and we began to process the day's haul only a few hours after I had landed, saw the exporter, and fields.

Carlos and a friend on the way up La Pastora

Coffee drying in parchment at Don Eli Micro-mill