Changes in Latitude

Coffee is integral to the culture of highland Central America.  Boquete, Chiriqui, near the Costa Rican border, is the Napa Valley of coffee, with over 20 local labels, tasting rooms, and finca tours.  Coffee aficionados from www.UniqueCoffee.com will be travelling to Boquete in Feburary.  In the meantime, notes from Roaster Seth Appell’s most recent visit to C. America are worth sharing…

“In a noble social experiment, the country of Costa Rica shunned the expense of a national army, investing instead in the building of schools and hospitals, providing low-cost education and healthcare for the general population. Rather than following the colonial model of large tracts of farmland owned by the wealthy minority, agricultural centers were built upon a cooperative model, providing coffee plants, education and materials at cost or free for anyone with even the smallest amount of arable land.

Spend a day with the members of CoopePalmares, and you quickly begin to understand the wealth and freedom of this country that values its families, heritage, and the skills necessary to produce truly fine coffee.

In the center of every coffee field is a home. Each proud farmer we met was born in the center of his own two or three acre coffee field. A man can tend two or three acres of coffee trees with his own hands. For 365 days a year, a farmer cultivates his tree’s, cleans the soil of weeds, and prepares for a harvest that returns a meager third of his income. 250 coffee trees produces that two sacks, or 300 pounds of coffee. And yet with this he sends his children to college. At harvest time the entire country returns to its roots. Children come home from school, and families reunite to harvest coffee across the country.

It is a fact that during my entire stay, I never met a man working at any job whose family was not involved in the coffee back home. It’s a simple fact of life that coffee provides only a portion of the income necessary for a good life, and indeed Costa Rica is a country with a comfortable middle-class. The spirit of “Pura Vida”, the pure life, is the spirit of the Costa Rican people.”

Coffee pickers from the indigenous Ngöbe are beginning to return from Costa Rica to their native Panama.  They have been helping with the larger cooperative’s harvests.  It is encouraging to realize how Panama respects its indigenous peoples.  The atlas reveals that Panama’s population is comprised of 8.4% indigenous peoples.  This atlas has a page for each tribe’s land area (Comarca).  Quick arithmetic reveals that Panama has reserved 20% of its land for its first Americans.  Panama’s Comarca’s are not marginal lands; but prime property.  This is tangible respect.

I recently had the joy of meeting Dra. Maria Ruiz of Boquete’s Casa Ruiz.  We discussed coffee and philosophy.  I was mesmerized by Dra. Ruiz’s perspective on the subject of creating peace within a community.  “Peace results when people respect (and feel respected by) their neighbors”.   Respect is a reoccurring theme this week.

This theme reminds me of a recent journey to meet the people of Latin America’s last kingdom, the Naso.  The Naso Comarca is on Panama’s Rio Teribe, where villagers live in harmony with the land, off the grid, growing almost everything they need to thrive gracefully in concert with Mother Earth, including coffee and cacao for chocolate.  The Naso raft down river to trade surplus crops for grains and other incidentals.  My children couldn’t believe how happy the Naso children are without electronic diversions.

Unlike the Naso, many Ngöbe live outside of their Comarcas.  Like Costa Rica, entire families are involved in harvest coffee.  Unlike Costa Rica, many farms are too large to be owner tended, and the Ngöbe people tend the crops year round, living on the fincas.  Others follow harvests and return to their Comarca for the balance of the year.  The return of the harvesters is an exciting time in Boquete and, for several months each year, the entire pueblo revolves around coffee, festivals, and the holidays.

For information on an upscale tour of this area and some of its finer cafes, fincas, and many rainforest adventures, check out our Coffee Culture Tour link.

Coffee from Panama has won the international cupping contest during seven of the last 11 years. Three times the winner was Cafe Ruiz, which we toured today. The other two winners are Cafe Lerida & Cafe Geisha. These small-scale family farms choose the environmentally friendly, shade grown technique. Coffee is grown beneath fruit and native hardwood trees. In this picture from Cafe Ruiz you see a hummingbird nest in the coffee tree.

Cafe Ruiz is located in the Boquete valley, pictured below. Boquete is situated in the rainforest of the fertile western highlands of Panama. Here the cloud forest´s abundant moisture and the volcanic soil combine with ideal growing conditions to produce some of the world´s best coffee. Panama is at the same latitude as Ethiopia which is home to the Arabica tree, the oldest and best tasting species of coffee in the world.

Coffee is harvested by hand in Boquete, from October through March. There is amazing attention to quality through the following 12-step process, according to our guide Israel of Casa Ruiz:

1. Selection by hand of only ripe beans.
2. Sorting by density with water. Beans that float indicate damage from insects, fungus, or sunlight, so only the beans that sink are utilized. Floaters are sold to other companies which put their brand on the coffee – Cafe Ruiz will not.
3. Pulping to remove the liquid that would lead to over fermentation.
4. Fermentation
5. Washing
6. Drying
7. Resting to age the beans for 4 months to allow for detection of defects that passed through the processes above.
8. Peeling off the parchment.
9. Sorting by size (there are 13 sizes), density by air (weight), and color. Only the green beans go forward. Yellow indicates the bean was picked too soon, black too late, and blue or red indicate fungus.
10. The good sizes are mixed back together.
11. Batch roasting to allow for selection by taste.
12. Final grading

There are three grades:

Specialty – for export. This grade constitutes 80% of the yield of Casa Ruiz farms. There are 11 major farms and many other small, family farms which bring their beans to Casa Ruiz for processing.

Premium – This grade receives all the processing above, except for color processing, and is not exported.

Standard – This grade is also for the domestic market.

The most award-winning farm in the Casa Ruiz enterprise is La Berlina, which sells for $25 – $50 per pound, at the farm, depending on the yield in any given year. It consistently places in French, USA, and Panamanian cupping competitions. I bought some of this for my friend Seth, who is a coffee aficionado, and will post his remarks soon.

Cafe Geisha has sold for up to $130 per pound, at the farm. Sorry Seth, I can´t afford it!

Cafe Ruiz doesn´t export roasted coffee, but they do roast. We saw the company´s first roaster – a bowl that was placed in a fire, their first roasting machine, from France, and every machine they have used since then. Five roasts are observed. Approximate times follow:

1. Gourmet – 13 minutes
2. European – 14 minutes
3. Latin – 15 minutes
4. Italian – 18 minutes
5. French – 20 minutes, at which point the beans lose all subtle flavors and become like Starbuck´s beans – burnt.

We had the pleasure of meeting Plinio Ruiz, son of the 85-year old Plinio Ruiz who was the 2nd generation of coffee growers behind his father who homesteaded in Boquete in the 1890´s.

Join us in October and we´ll tour the fields, processing plants, roasting room, and cafe!

To buy coffee from C. America in the USA, roasted by my friend Seth the same day he ships it to you, visit http://www.uniquecoffee.com/ (Seth stocks Cafe Ruiz when available.)