La Taza de Excelencia: Slurp, swish and spit

---

A zestful slurping chorus cuts through the whirring produced by a struggling air conditioner in the corner. Some slurps sound higher, like the buzz of a coffee grinder before you make your morning brew. Others lower more closely resemble the gurgle of an espresso machine churning out a shot. And others remind me of the roar of a jet engine. Some of the world’s most sophisticated coffee palates stand, deep in thought, at long rectangle tables where cups line up in pairs. A woman makes a note on her clip board after a long pondering look across the room before dipping her round silver spoon back into the cups. She slurps, swishes and spits the brown liquid into a white paper cup in her left hand before moving onto the next. A tall, lean man with a healthy head of hair sits in one of the chairs along the wall, scribbling away. He looks up, undecided, and returns to the table for one last slurp. The Texan strolls to the back of the room to look at lines of ground coffee under a lighted microscope. He shakes his head as if his darkest suspicion confirmed and the roast is indeed uneven. Every brow is furrowed and a tension characteristic of final exams fills the room. No one talks for fear that others opinions will influence their palate perceptions. As they finish the morning round, a silence of slurps fills the room.

To the international panel before me, cupping coffee is a serious affair that bears no resemblances to the casual atmosphere of their shops. They stand with furrowed brows in an air conditioned conference room at the EntrePinos Hotel in La Palma in search of the most exceptional Salvadoran coffee, the coffee that will take home the top prize in the 2008 El Salvador Cup of Excellence.

The Cup of Excellence is a coffee tasting competition, known in industry lingo as cupping. Run by a non-profit organization out of Montana, the goal of the competition is to create infrastructure across the coffee industry geared towards producing gourmet level coffee, transforming local and international markets from a competition down to the lowest price for the greatest quantity to a competition where buyers drive up prices in their search of the best tasting product. Farmers enter one lot of this year’s harvest to be held in the Cup of Excellence warehouse, where it stays till the results of the competition. Then the farmers wait. From hundreds of entries, the twenty best coffees are selected for the auction. For a farmer, winning the Cup of Excellence is like winning the lottery. They can receive prices as high as 30 dollars a pound of green coffee. Thirty times what they would receive on the local market. Farmers then make connections with gourmet roasters who love their beans. From the first slurp, these connections can become partnerships that bear economic fruit for years.

I found myself at the Cup of Excellence to organize a field trip for some of the roasters. Due to my uncle’s propensity for the Harley blend created by his local roaster in Topeka, KS, I met Jeff Taylor of PT’s Coffee. Jeff is an example of a progressive roaster who travels the world in search of premium coffees. Due to his discerning palate, he sits on the panel of the 2008 Cup of Excellence in El Salvador. For weeks I had been considering that beyond certification, the most powerful mechanism for sustainable farming may be the connection between a sustainability minded roaster and a farmer without the means to make sustainable farming a reality. I thought that if a roaster sponsored a sustainable development project in a coffee farming community run by third party agency then a long-term market connection could accompany the initial donation. Charity plus economic empowerment. The farmers would have a sustainable program with a strong economic base and the roaster would be deeply invested in the success of the community. The roaster could then market this project to their customers, perhaps under their own label, as a targeted approach to sustainability. A direct form of “fair trade” rather than the general approach peddled by the label on the bag signaling certification.

The presence of these roasters in a community at the fledgling stage of a sustainability project provided the perfect opportunity to test run my theory. My goal was to use the presence of these roasters to inspire farmers in the project while providing the roasters with an opportunity to see and understand some of the difficulties faced by farmers of few means in creating and marketing high quality coffee.

We left the hotel EntrePinos in a convey of white trucks. Fredy, the site project director, drove the first pickup with myself in the passenger seat and John Gutz, a roaster from LA, and Alistair Moody, a wholesaler from Vancover, riding in the back. Manual, owner of one of the farms we would visit, drove the second truck with my friend Jeff from Topeka, Ginnheld, who works for a roaster in Norway and John Moore a representative of Counter Culture Coffee in New York. No one in the second truck was bilingual and I gave a thought for a second to how they would communicate.

As thunder clapped in the background and rain ominously threatened, we drove up the steep dirt road to Manual’s farm. Educated and well-spoken, he wanted to bring the roasters to see the extensive damage done by the cyclone like storm that ripped through the countryside this year. Last year’s Cup of Excellence winner lost his entire farm. Fifty to seventy-five percent of Manual’s farm was completely destroyed. The trees that can recover will not produce a good crop for two to three years, while the rest will have to be completely replanted. Manual proudly explained to the roasters that he was taking this opportunity to replace all the fallen trees with the Paca Mara variety due to its more pleasing taste characteristics. Several lots of Paca Mara will almost certainly dominate the top ten at the Cup as roasters love its smooth, consistently pleasing flavors, never overly acidic or under whelming. Manual, who has attended all the farmer roaster social events at the Cup, sees a prize in his future.

Rain drops began to fall and we had to curtail our second farm visit because the dirt mountain roads were impassible. Instead we pull up to a simple home with a tin roof and concrete walls. Two lines of chairs sit facing one another, with one in the middle. Seven farmers patiently await our arrival. I sit in the center, with the English speaking, worldly westerners with a fine tuned coffee palate on the left and to my right the Spanish speaking farmers whose education ranges from barely able to write their names to a university degree. In that moment, I feel like a bridge between two completely different set of life experiences. For the farmers, their daily routine revolves around the seasons on the farm, putting down fertilizer when it rains and picking coffee when the cherries turn from green to red. They see coffee in terms of the needs of the trees, the soil, and the farm and the income it brings home to their children. For the roasters, coffee is all about the cup, the unique flavors of different origins across the globe brought forth by the perfect roast. Their passports are decorated with visas to Africa and stamps from Central America. All from their global quest to bring the best beans back to fuel the customers of their low-key coffee shops.

The farmers began. They described their concerns about the local coyotes, struggles to access a better market and the pennies they are paid for their coffee. Miguel says, “The coyotes do not care about quality. We have no choice but to sell to whoever offers us the highest price.” From that moment on, the roasters command the conversation. They describe the price they are willing to pay for high quality coffee. For the roasters to purchase their coffee, the farmers need to work with a cooperative to process their coffee to a higher standard and serve as one voice for all in the market. Jon Gutz explains he pays $1.80 for organic beans. At this lofty price, they only buy the highest quality coffee. The farmers sit intensely listening to me convey the roasters thoughts. Adrenaline courses through my veins. I am the crux on which the conversation turns.

The farmers ask how they know the final price and if they can sell directly to the roasters. The roasters respond, “No, that’s not possible because we need to work with exporters and importers to move the coffee across borders, in and out of the country. We work with transparency contracts which state everyone’s costs and how much they receive for it. Everyone needs to make a profit, as this is business, but the farmers will know how much profit each middleman and the roasters make.” Farmers nod in agreement, though I wonder how beneficial information about a transparency contract is to a farmer with 20 acres, struggling to convince his neighbors to join forces and sell their coffee together.

A young man seizes on this opportunity and asks, “What are your quality credentials? How are we supposed to know what you like?” The roasters describe cupping. They see trained cuppers that are one of the many benefits of a cooperative. John Mooe says he loves to come and work with the local cupper so he or she - and women make the best cuppers, pregnant women - knows exactly what they’re looking for in a cup. There is a points system on which they can use to communicate. I feel a wave of acknowledgement fill the room. While pricing and transparency contracts may seem like an intangible future potential, their own cupper who understands what these international buyers like in a coffee cup is a concrete benefit of forming a cooperative that the farmers grasp. For a moment, the two ridges meet in a mutual recognition of a shared commonality.
As we come to the end of the interaction, a young female farmer interjects her voice into the conversation. Her commanding presence surprises me as do her well-chosen words and the way the older men defer to her. Her strong presence in a room where women are normally relegated to the kitchen reveals a strong education. My brain was a puddle of Spanish and English. I do not remember exactly what she said, but rather the feeling in the room. Everyone sat up a little taller, westerners and Salvadorans alike, to listen to her speak.

As we descend the mountain, I wonder what we accomplished. Nothing concrete I’m sure, but perhaps an acknowledgement of possibilities. For the farmers, the cooperative they are working hard to form has already introduced them to these wealthy individuals of means who buy only the best coffee. For the roasters, perhaps, they now have a greater realization of how hard it is to bring the potential of great coffee to fruition in a long-term sustainable manner that enriches the community from which it is picked and their customer’s palates.

---