Fresh Cup

JUL 2012

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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"Small Farmer, Big Plans" is a Fresh Cup series tracking a year in the life of Honduran farmer Antonio "Toñito" Ponce Bautista as he attempts to bring his coffee to the specialty market for the first time, with the help of rural development organization Unión MicroFinanza (UMF). This is the final installment. S ometimes things don't go as planned, even if you feel like you did everything right. This was one of those years for Toñito and thousands of other coffee farmers around San Carlos, La Unión and all of Honduras. But first, the good news: Toñito produced praise-worthy cof- fee. "This is the second-best coffee I have tasted all year," says Beneficio Santa Rosa cupper Wilberto Ponce about Toñito's Yellow Catuai varietal lot. (He says the best was from Alfredo Ponce, another La Unión farmer who processed his coffee at UMF's beneficio.) For Josh Longsdorf, owner and head roaster of Anthology Coffee in Detroit, the coffee was good enough to use in com- petition: In March, he featured the first lot that Toñito pro- duced this year in his routine at the North Central Regional Barista Competition, describ- ing the coffee as having "a chocolaty body, tamarind acid- ity, brown sugar sweetness, and notes of clove and hibiscus." And now the bad news: Toñito was only able to produce 382 pounds of coffee for export this year, which is not enough to export as a single-farmer micro- lot. (We would need around 1,500 pounds to do that.) In the previous installment of "Small Farmer, Big Plans" Toñito's first coffee had been processed and cupped, but he was waiting for more coffee to ripen so he could reach the micro-lot amount. Unfortunately, that additional harvest never happened. DIFFICULTIES IN THE FIELDS Toñito wasn't the only farmer who experienced this problem. Farmers all over Honduras found all their plants hitting the ripe stage at once, rather than in the normal three stages. The exact cause is unknown, but one possible culprit is the rain, which didn't come as expected last June. That situation kept farmers from fertilizing at the proper time and threw off plants' flowering and ripening cycles. Even farmers like Toñito who saw it coming couldn't do much. "I am going to pick today," said Toñito one morning during harvest, "but there isn't anybody to help me do it." San Carlos is a small town. During peak harvest, people work up to six days a week picking coffee, and the pickers were unable to keep up with a harvest stage that was 50 to 75 percent higher than normal. When Toñito went to look for people to help him in the field, there was no one available. This went on for almost a month. Toñito would call in the morn- ing and say, "It is just my son and I today, and we need to pick over-ripe coffee before it falls off of the trees. But don't worry, COMPETITION-WORTHY: At the North Central Regional Barista Competition in March, Josh Longsdorf (left) of Detroit's Anthology Coffee featured Toñito's coffee in his routine. we will try again tomorrow." Finally, after a month, Toñito called and said that he was able to pick coffee on a part of his field that had a mix of ripe and over-ripe coffee—this section of land was populated with Yellow Catuai plants, a slower-ripening varietal. That day, Toñito and his son picked until 2 p.m., then spent the next two hours removing the over-ripe coffee from their baskets. He sent the coffee to the processing facility on a bus that passes San Carlos each day. It was fantastic coffee, marked by big, bright yellow cherries. But there was a problem: The whole haul came to only 72 pounds. Even with the added income that could come through exporting directly, the transport costs alone would make such efforts unprofitable for Toñito. And so, with heavy hearts, the decision was made that this would be Toñito's final coffee of the year. continued on page 48 freshcup.com July 2012 47

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