A Spaniard’s fight to recover the world’s best coffee

A young Haitian day labourer smiles at the camera in the middle of the harvest.

‘A black coffee, please. We choose the bar on the corner, the one closest to work or the one with the friendliest waiter, down the cup in a couple of sips and carry on with our routine, but we generally don’t care about the origin or quality of what we have just consumed. Despite the fact that we drink more than 1,200 cups per year, coffee remains a great unknown. We have travelled to one of the most traditional coffee-growing regions in the Caribbean to discover what’s at the bottom of a cup of coffee.

«A black coffee, please. We are in Barahona, south of la Dominican Republic. The alleyways of the market bustle like a coffee pot, but the brew they serve is not very good; it’s made from leftovers that aren’t good enough to be exported. Between vegetable stalls, fly-covered piles of meat, fragrant fish and even medicines sold in bulk, dozens of motorbikes squeeze through. Like life here, they make their way through carefree, but are not above being involved in accidents.

There are hardly any tourists to be seen. The beaches of the Enriquillo region have never been good for bathing, but its valleys are fertileHUntil not so long ago, the countryside fed the population fairly comfortably. Bananas, sugar cane and coffee, lots of coffee. It is said that «the conditions were so good that people hardly needed to look after the plantations.». In the 1980s, the Barahona area alone exported almost 180,000 quintals of coffee a year (at 46 kilos per quintal). In 2018, this was less than 22,000 quintals for the whole country. What happened?

leavesMuch of the blame lies with rust, a fungus that destroys coffee leaves y lleva diezmando la producción de Centroamérica desde los años 90. En 2010 se declaró un nuevo brote de la plaga, cada vez más virulenta por los efectos del cambio climático. Speculation on international prices did the rest. In 2001, a pound of coffee beans was worth 0.41 dollars, not enough to cover production costs, and thousands of families left the coffee plantations for the east to make a living from tourism. Today the price is back below one dollar and has once again set alarm bells ringing in the sector.

‘A black coffee, please. We are in Polo, a small town at the foot of the Sierra de Bahoruco, populated by small coffee growers. On the road you can see some piles of beans that the more modest harvesters put out to dry on the asphalt, ‘in the hope that the traffic of cars will speed up the process’, explains José Miguel Medina, head of the local radio station. They need money fast. ‘Polo used to be rich and now lives subsidised by the government, it has become one of the poorest municipalities in the country,’ laments Mayor Danilsa Cuevas. The remaining producers are older, 75% lack land titles and access to credit is a chimera. Without care and pest control, productivity is derisory.

Haunted estates

But there are a handful of farms that produce more every day. ‘The neighbours say we have a bacá, a kind of pact with the devil,’ he jokes. César Ros. This Catalan master coffee maker is the grandson of the founder of the Barcelona-based Cafecrem, now part of the Costa Brava distribution group, and has spent a decade in the region trying to make the most of some of its best locations. He produces a speciality coffee, using local varieties in a traditional way, ‘which is three times more expensive and less productive’, but by rationalising the harvest and encouraging simple tasks such as pruning, weeding and raising the shade, he manages to obtain the equivalent of around 45 cups per plant.

Muchos quieren trabajar para él. El jornal en las fincas de la compañía se paga al mismo precio que el resto -100 pesos (2 dólares) por cada lata de 20 litros de fruto recogido- pero aquí las plantas están mucho más cargadas. Al final del día, los recolectores se reúnen en el batey para entregar la cosecha. La mayoría son haitianos que cruzan la frontera para huir del caos en el que lleva sumido el país desde hace décadas. Aguardan pacientemente a que el jefe de campo examine cada saco con una rudimentaria tabla de defectos. Si de la muestra de 50 bayas, más de 5 tienen falta, tendrán que vaciar la bolsa para eliminar los granos verdes o sobremadurados, antes de volver a pasar el examen. Josefa sonríe. Nunca falla y es siempre la que más cosecha, por eso sus compañeros la llaman ‘la millonaria’. Sus manos curtidas saben elegir bien. Más le vale, si quiere sacar adelante a su rosario de hijos.

‘A black coffee, please. We have just had lunch at the factory where the production from the farms managed by Cafecrem arrives every day. Ros and his team have developed a semi-craft process that allows them to take advantage of the natural sweetness of the pulp to obtain a coffee that needs practically no sugar. They call it Mieludo and it consists of soaking the fruit for 16 hours to initiate fermentation, so that the pulp adheres to the bean, which is then left to dry in the shade on African beds for more than a month. After sorting by size and a final sieving carried out bean by bean by bean by a group of local women, the result in the cup is a coffee ‘with a lot of body, marked but very balanced acidity and notes of caramel’, explains the master coffee maker during a tasting in which he gets to try more than twenty samples. Infused slowly and served in a cup to appreciate the nuances, the experience is nothing like drinking a cup in two sips at the bar.

Two weeks after the trip, I recognise the logo of the company founded by César’s grandfather in a café in Barcelona, and I remember Josefa’s tanned hands, the twinkle in José Miguel’s eye, or the smile of the Haitian man who illustrates these lines and whose name I forgot to ask. ‘A black coffee, please.

 

For more information:

https://www.diariovasco.com/sociedad/viaje-fondo-taza-20190311093750-ntvo.html

https://www.ideal.es/sociedad/viaje-fondo-taza-20190310085703-ntvo.html