One-minute excerpt of S5E1 of Schitt's Creek, a fair-use clip for educational purposes. May be blocked in some locations; may not be used on monetized sites.
"Coffee Movie!" or "Library Movie!" are expressions we use in the Hayes-Boh household to express our joy when encountering our favorite subjects in a film or a television show. A fantasy sabbatical project of mine, for example, would be to string together all of the coffee references in M*A*S*H; my favorite librarian even has a television tag for entries in her famous "Library" Books blog.
Our pandemic television roster now includes Schitt's Creek, a series to which we are late arrivals. The low-brow veneer covers some rather clever humor in a series that is essentially an inversion of The Beverly Hillbillies. Some scenes are set in a café, but the one that caught our attention takes place in the lobby of the very modest motel that is more central to the series.
John first mentions coffee as nothing more than a caffeine vehicle -- fuel for a tired person. Stevie tries to discourage him, suggesting that even his low expectations of quality will not be met.
Coffee quality matters, even when expectations are low. Coffee passes through 50 or more steps from seed to cup, and choices at each step affect quality. Sometimes I can tell that nearly every step went awry.
On June 26 of this year, I was pleased to be part of a wide-ranging discussion of coffee quality with two worker-owners of one of my favorite coffee companies: Equal Exchange. This was a public presentation via Zoom, for citizen-consumers all over the United States. If you have not already seen it, I invite you to watch the archive video, as we talk about the positive correlation between the relationships with farmers and the final quality in the cup.
I provide links and put the discussion in context with two separate blog posts -- Fair Trade on my Aw, Professor blog and Micro Quality on this one.
I was pleased to be part of an online discussion of coffee quality recently -- specifically about the connections between cupping quality and the quality of life for the people who grow the coffee. The short version: better quality is good for producers. Feel free to watch the long version of our discussion, entitled Our Version of the Perfect Cup, and to read about the context of that conversation.
This discussion was part of an ongoing series of educational events organized by the Equal Exchange Action Forum, the citizen-consumer arm of the fair-trade company. Equal is known for its leadership in coffee, but now sells cocoa, tea, cashews, and other products on behalf of small farmers throughout the world. The Action Forum allows its customers to think deeply about the entire food system and to collaborate on making it healthier and fairer for people and the planet.
A central premise of our discussion is that higher quality in the coffee itself is associated with the development of producer communities. It also reflects one of the principle benefits of the entire fair-trade movement in my view: greater transparency and better connections between those who produce food (if we count coffee as a food) and those who consume it. As we explain, prior to the fair-trade movement, farmers has little if any information about the quality (and therefore the real value) of their products.
So please listen to the conversation in which we explore these connections; for those who have not given much to how high quality is achieved in coffee or why it matters, I think we provide a worthwhile introduction. As we explain in our discussion, an important aspect of improving coffee quality is the selection of better-quality coffee at various stages. From picking the coffee through roasting it, the best beans can be separated to get increasingly high-scoring results in the cup (coffee is scored much like wine).
Mild spoiler alert: I went looking for an image like this on
Instagram while watching one of the videos below. I should
not have been surprised that the first good example I found
was posted by the same person! It is part of a series of slides that
presents his case about microlots in a different way.
But please note that my co-presenter Mike Mowry begins to explain the problems that can arise from a focus on microlots, which are at the far end of the quality distribution. Microlots are very small batches of coffee -- perhaps just a couple of 100-pound bags -- that have been cultivated, selected, and processed with great care. They have the potential to earn premiums far above the price of ordinary coffee, and even more than most specialty coffee.
My co-presenter Mike Mowry begins to explain this during our conversation, and afterwards he shared two videos from Colombia that explain why high quality being good does not mean that extremely high quality is better. In two segments that are part of a series of videos about coffee economics on the Cedro Alto Coffee channel, Karl Weinhold explains the math of microlots and how that math tends to work against farmers, and especially farmer cooperatives. Hint: it is not simply a matter of only a few farmers getting the premium prices; even those getting the premiums might not fare well overall.
To be honest, I had not thought seriously about the potential downside of microlots until we began to prepare for our presentation. I remember the thrill of visited a mill specializing in microlots during my January 2018 visit to Estelí, Nicaragua. For a coffee nerd who cares about the farmers, the land, and the cup, it was exhilarating. So learning about the potential downside of ultrahigh quality was sobering.
Africa-bed drying of microlots in Estelí, Nicaragua. These beans are being
dried with extraordinary care, in lots as small as 5 pounds (nanolots).
Lagniappe
Long before I knew anything about quality in coffee, I read and re-read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values (Phaedrus, #1). Much of the book concerns Robert Pirsig's maddening (literally) pursuit of the meaning of the word "quality." The rest of the book concerns a long ride on a motorcycle.
I started my Sunday with this discussion between journalist Guy Raz and volcanologist Andrés Ruzo, whose childhood conversations at home led him to an amazing discovery in the Amazon Basin of Peru. (Because it contains have of the basin, Brazil is the best-known of the Amazon countries, but several upstream neighbors also have vast tracts of the basin and its forests.)
I recommend listening to the audio and then watching Dr. Ruzo's full TED Talk, given in 2014 in Rio de Janeiro. His story begins with curiosity, legend, and history. It provides insight into indigenous knowledge, geothermal science, ecology, and the concept of ecotourism.
It even touches on coffee! And from the TED Radio summary, I learn of Dr. Ruzo's coffee connection. In addition to growing up in Peru, part of his childhood was near volcanoes in Nicaragua, which means he is not far removed from coffeelands.
Over the weekend, New York Times journalist Kirk Semple and photojournalist Daniele Volpe provide a comprehensive update on the dire condition of Nicaragua. For those of us who love Nicaragua -- meaning anybody who has visited -- the title is heart-breaking, because it summarizes a dire condition that we could not have imagined six months ago: ‘There’s No Law’: Political Crisis Sends Nicaraguans Fleeing. (See my July 27 Nicaragua's Kent State post for a bit more about recent developments.)
Semple details the losses in the tourism industry that have resulted from
the government's lawless response to protests since April.
Photographer Volpe captures one of my very favorite places in this photo --
the usually bustling main square of Granada, now idle.
The NYT article hints at a question I have had since the very beginning. The second political life of the FSLN has relied on a strange combination of revolutionary rhetoric and nostalgia on the one hand (left) and alliance with ruthless economic elites on the other (right). Both are suffering in this crisis; I am especially surprised that the economic elites have not reigned in the president.
What to Do
From the United States, there is little that we can do, other than support international diplomatic efforts and the recent bipartisan Congressional Resolution 981. Given the sordid history of U.S. intervention, it is not productive to go further than this; we must leave it to the people of Nicaragua and diplomats in the region to bring about a political solution.
Meanwhile, we can provide moral support and material aid, which we have begun to do.
As of this writing, we are a few dollars away from wrapping up a fundraiser for emergency relief in several communities in Nicaragua. We -- a team from Bridgewater State University in Massachusetts and Saint Joseph's University in Philadelphia -- raised $1,500 in just over a week, which our close contacts in Matagalpa and Managua will use to provide food and medical supplies. This follows $3,000 raised in previous fundraisers by Bridgewater State alumni.
We are not done, though: we will soon be joining with friends in Nicaragua to launch an even bigger fundraiser, one that will have a longer-term impact. A team from Matagalpa Tours -- which has organized travel for me and more than 100 BSU students and faculty since 2009 -- has proposed an expansion of its non-profit Agualí program.
Details and an opportunity to donate will be added to this post in coming days.
Geography asks three questions:
