Fresh Cup

MAY 2014

Fresh Cup Magazine, providing specialty coffee and tea professionals with unique insight into the trends, ideas, products and people that shape their world.

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63 freshcup.com | May 2014 t's an eighty-mile, two-hour jour- ney from San Salvador, the capital of El Salvador, to Finca Los Planes on the border of Honduras, and along the whole drive Sergio and Isabel Ticas and Jeff Taylor have been exchanging stories and laughing. The banter and mirth make it hard to believe this is essentially an inter- national business meeting, though one held in an extended-cab pickup truck. Sergio occasionally weighs in from the driver's seat, while his wife drives the conversation from the cab. Isabel is an ebullient, blonde, blue-eyed woman of German descent who grew up in this small Central American nation. She's a keen trans- lator for her quiet, yet resolute hus- band, a seasoned veteran of specialty coffee. For the past decade the good- humored Jeff Taylor, a co-founder of PT's Coffee Roasting in Topeka, has traveled from his home on the Kansas plains to mountainous farms across Central and South America to source coffee and build the kind of relationships many now recognize as a hallmark of the third wave. Jeff has bought green beans from Sergio and Isabel, who own Finca Los Planes, after successfully bidding on their first Cup of Excellence lot in 2006. In the slow ascent up to the north- western plateau shared by El Salvador and Honduras, beds of fallen pine needles blanket the road's shoulder. Before we cross over the river where Sergio first learned to swim some fifty years ago, he stops to purchase some queso fresco. Approaching the farm, the truck passes a local clinic and school, both of which received donations from Jeff and PT's. Within moments of reaching the finca we are touring Sergio's Secret Garden, a steeply graded microlot of red bourbon and yellow caturra, ensconced in wind-blocking cordons made of twelve-foot-tall barrier trees. The smaller coffee trees line up in rows separated by narrow passage- ways, the plants so close their branches cross into one another. A handful of trees look bare, hanging onto dam- aged leaves, signaling exhausted or rust-stricken limbs. Norma, a wiz- ened harvester who for thirty-five years has worked in the coffee fields surrounding the village of Los Planes, applies herself to one tree at a time. Her fingers nimbly comb through each cluster, only picking the cher- ries of proper ripeness. She is flanked by Yesenia and Lupe, each at their own tree carrying baskets that hold twenty-five pounds of cherries. These baskets are the unit of measure when it is time to tally the day's earnings. After peeking in for just an hour to observe and ask questions, we head to the plantation's cabin for din- ner while the harvesters bring the day's yield up the hill for de-pulping. Yesenia and Lupe, neither much more than a 100 pounds, yoke several bags to their backs and haul them up grades as steep as thirty degrees. The farm's wet mill was constructed using the funds gained from the Cup of Excellence lot in 2006, which sold for $17 a pound, approximately fourteen times the world price at the time. At the cabin's dinner table, a group that had been very talkative on the ride from the city is now silenced by hot pupusas filled with the super- fresh cheese and served with warm tomato sauce. It's a delicious reminder that we are on the El Salvador side I This page: Workers gathering cherries before processing. The basket, called an arroba , is the unit of measure for the harvester's tally. Opposite: Yesenia carrying fifty pounds of coffee cherries to the wet mill. May14_magazine.indd 63 4/18/14 10:45 AM

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