Roastmaster's Blog

The pin-pricks of coffee’s tiny guardian mosquitos remind me that in the dense, diminutive forest of it’s mountainsides I am a guest, and its harvesters are armored with long sleeves and t-shirts around their heads appearing like so many muslim women, faces protruding from a habit of Hanes.  Like soldiers waiting to be called upon to defend the coffee.  I skirt amongst outstretched branches, a turnstile of spindly sticks and corrugated leaves, the smallest of which have a thick, rubbery texture that seem to transmit to me the health and wellbeing of the plant when I caress its surfaces as one in love.

They ask me why I touch the leaves that way.

I like to feel them.

They ask if I have children.

The coffee trees are my children.

They say I have a lot of children.

I love coffee.  It’s fruit is a life-force I pluck with earnestness and purpose.  I select the ripe cherries intently and pop them in my mouth for a chew on the fibrous skin and I tuck the twin seeds in my cheek to taste its slimy fructose-covered shell, like a chipmunk storing up for winter.  Or I pop them in my blue jeans pocket, filling with seeds of the Maragogipe or cherry of the Yellow Caturra.  Amongst millions of trees, each bearing over a thousand cherries, they ask why I put several in my pockets.

These are magical beans.

They think I am crazy.

I look into the eyes of the coffee picker and I ask her name and she says Claudia.  She tells me she is thirty years old.  I ask her how long she has been picking coffee and she tells me, “All of my life.”  I tell her she is beautiful.

I examine the strong yet delicate hands of the farmer whose skin is creased with a lifeline that parallels the family tree of his coffee.  The sticky stains of coffee juice show upon his clothes and the knowing way he manages the harvest.

And the processing of our coffee crisscrosses cultures and interweaves several centuries of rudimentary practices.  I ask, when was the contemporary machine invented that removes the skins of the cherry and which is so pervasive across the coffee washing stations throughout the world.  They tell me around 1650, when the Dutch took coffee from the arid mountains of Yemen and planted it in the island rainforests of Indonesia.  An enduring method and machine, invented of necessity by interlopers.

The history of the process is the history of the cup.  From the port of Mocha in Yemen to Java, Indonesia, the world’s oldest blend was born.  The traditional dry process of Yemen and Ethiopia yields distinctly different flavors than the wet process that enabled coffee cultivation to be spread throughout the world.  The colors and fragrances of these unroasted, processed coffees trickle through my fingers  and into my nose as I sift through my burlap meditation garden.

Coffee is the history of bondage and freedom.  Of the slavery once predominant in plantations of French and English and Dutch colonies and of the uprising of the suppressed.  In roasting coffee, as the color changes from green to straw to tan and the aromas evolve, the coffee is absorbing the heat from its environment in the roasting drum.  But at a certain time and temperature in the cycle, our coffee begins to rise up exothermically, audibly snapping and releasing energy in a vibrant celebration of life and liberty.

I snoop around a coffee mill and I feel the tears in the plastic mesh flooring of a raised bed built for a special project of naturals just for me.  A European roaster inquires curiously but conservatively, and I ask if he is interested in the natural.

NO, he snaps.

They tell me someday my palate will mature and I won’t like those coffees any more.

I think, maybe my respect for mankind will mature someday and I won’t like freedom or diversity any more.  And I’ll take my elite cupping spoon to Costa Rica to subdue the coffees under one standard profile.  Should we not question the status quo and ride away in container ships back to San Francisco, our bland, unwavering coffees barely allowed to reach that exothermic crack before being put down, hushed.

In Costa Rica, coffee transformed from ornamental garden plant into the chief export in the mid-1800s.  

Seeing a weakness in the recently-independent states of Nicaragua and Costa Rica, a privateer named William Walker gathered a small army and set sail from San Francisco to make slave states of those emerging countries.  His success in Nicaragua was quelled by an uprising of meager but impassioned farmers from the rolling countryside of northern Costa Rica.  The impromptu civil defense drove the pirates back into Nicaragua, trapped in a hostel in the town of Rivas.  One young farm boy-turned-drummer boy from the town of Alajuela charged the hostel and set fire to its foundations, laying waste to the fortress and sending Walker and his cohorts fleeing to Honduras where they were summarily executed by firing squad.

Inspired by the young Alajuelan, Juan Santamaria, whose nickname was El Erizo, we pay homage to his bravery and forthrightness.  Our first special coffee for this holiday season, El Erizo, is a departure from the pent-up standards espoused by San Franciscans, where they roast only washed coffees and only until they begin to hear the coffee cry out, whereas the voices of the past make them nervous and the emerging uniqueness of flavors, of freedom, are dismissed, enslaved.  And we burn down those walls and release the sweetness and amazing flavors within the coffee, within the farm boy who planted and picked the coffee.  With Thanksgiving we offer this rare treat - a Honey Process from Alajuela that tastes, in all my experience, like a beautiful natural.

They ask me why I love the coffee.

It personifies freedom.

Yellow has never been my favorite color.  I look around and see it non-intrusively accenting the room, a powerful, though scant slice of the color spectrum.  Most of life is muted earth-tones and yellow is celestial.  A yellow flower in a field of green and brown is a paragon of uniqueness, leadership, or outstanding beauty.  Our yellow star provides warmth and happiness, though in extremes, misery.  And the yellow in our urban society warns us to be cautious.  Yellow, in moderation, is fantastic.

As an incautious kid, I roamed the woods and fields, first of the corn and soy prairies of Illinois, and then of the cross timbers in southern Oklahoma.  Days and nights were spent building tree forts, fishing for mud cats, exploring every hill and dale, and of course playing "war" with my cousins.  Like the kids of "Lord of the Flies," our free time was spent dividing and conquering one another.  On my Uncle's 80-acre pastureland were two ponds, sparse woods, a hay barn, and a pair of combines - an immense battlefield with adequate relief and cover. 

On a sunny Summer Sunday, after lunch all the boys of my extended (and extensive) family grabbed a broomstick or some other janitorial representation of a weapon and we split into 2 groups.  We fled in separate directions into the wilds, avoiding cows and their excrement.  Our troop ranged the ponds and pastures looking for the enemy, with occasional contact and shouts of "BANG BANG BANG! I GOT YOU!"  Invariably if one cousin got the jump on another cousin, the surprise attack would win out and no matter how much negotiation, the surprised party would succumb to their slow reactions and relent to lie on the ground, close their eyes, and count to 100 while the ambush team scampered off looking for another tactical position.

My team crossed a dike containing one end of a cow pond, and descended the grassy slope where we climbed over a huge tree which had died and fallen like Gulliver on Lilliput.  I, being the younger of my cousins, hung back and waited for each one to crest the horizontal trunk and leap to the ground.  When my turn came, I stepped down onto a lower part of the trunk and suddenly, having fallen through rotten wood, found myself engulfed in a nest of angry, swarming, stinging yellow jackets.  My older cousin pulled me out and carried me back to the house, as, from shock or venom, I couldn't stand.*

Way back in the hills, up a long dirt road is another farm called La Pastora.  This farm, far from the rolling plains of Oklahoma, has steep fields upon the mountainsides of Costa Rica's Tarrazu, planted not in hay and cattle, but short, spindly coffee trees.  The owner of La Pastora, Minor Esquival Picado, is the epitome of a happy, paradisiacal homeowner.  You'd almost think his every-present grin was the product of having seen our lifestyle and then reverting back to his leisurely customs.  But I suspect Minor has never been far from home.

Unusually, Minor built a small but pristine mill out of concrete and a mishmash of ceramic tile remnants, many broken into pieces.  He uses this mill to process small lots of coffee that he thinks will be special and worth more than the regular coffee he sells to the regional mill in San Marcos.  After Minor built his micro- wet mill, he began experimenting with Naturals and Honey coffees.  Laying the coffee to dry in the sun on raised, African-style beds, which Minor built on the flat, dry ground between the mill and storage barn, he produced three different styles of Honey coffee.  They are called Black Honey, Yellow Honey, and White Honey, derived from the color of each bean as it dries in the sun.  Had Goldilocks the privilege of sampling the Three Bears' coffee stash, I don't think she would've done a better job than I of picking out the one that is just right.

I have two pictures hanging in my house that mean something extra-special to me.  One, a bluish-hued lithograph of "Lone Wolf" by Alfred Kowalski, which hung in the back room of my Grandpa's house above an old sewing machine.  In it, the foreground is of a wolf, his tracks visible in the snow, looking down a precipitous hillside onto a house - a very small village, maybe - what could be, except for the snow, Minor's farm.  The other picture is a yellowed print of a painting of James Earle Frasier's "End of the Trail."  This picture I got from my dad, who acquired it when he was a kid.  Only recently did I realize that both of these pictures have the same origin.  They were printed at a place in Chicago called Borin Mfg Co, both in 1925.  They're both in the original frames.  Borin printed dozens of paintings, and it appears that they maybe avoided paying royalties to the original artists by printing them all backward.  So I have two backward prints, one of a famous painting that seems to correspond to my M.O., and the other of a famous statue which now resides, forward-facing, at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City.  The story of Frasier's statue is a fascinating one, and it just so happens that Mark Brown wrote about it in the current issue of This Land magazine.  I stumbled into this history from a coin my dad gave me:  the Buffalo Nickel.  It's a keepsake.  An antique.  And originally designed and modeled by the same artist, James Earle Frasier, as a tribute to the American West.

I learned something at La Pastora that I probably could've learned at my Uncle's when I was carried back to my mom at HQ, a wounded soldier.  The skin of the coffee cherry, much like the wood of a hollow tree, is a protective coating.  When left intact, nature can take its course, the coffee cherries can dry into a sweet, fruity Natural; and the yellow jackets can work as a biological pest control by hunting other pests, reproduce into a seasonal colony of a few thousand, and no one would be the wiser.  But once that fragile shell is punctured, what's inside is volatile.  Honey Process coffees involve removing the protective skin of the cherry and exposing the sticky pulp to environmental forces of oxygen, bacteria, and yeast.  What Minor figured out is that falling into a nest of yellow jackets can leave a bad taste in your mouth.  He removed some of the pulp from the coffee beans.  Not all of it, but just the right amount.  And what he came up with is a smooth, delicious, sweet-tasting coffee that has all the fullness of flavor I look for in a special Thanksgiving offering.

La Pastora Yellow Honey, though grown in Costa Rica, came to fulfill its purpose here in Oklahoma, in my roaster, and ultimately in your cup.  Frasier's Indian found its end of the trail here too, but you'll have to read about that while drinking the Yellow.

Happy Thanksgiving, Y'all.

READ ABOUT THE BOX SET AND BUY LA PASTORA YELLOW HONEY HERE.

Buy the issue of This Land with Mark Brown's story of The End of the Trail here.

* The yellow jacket incident could explain how I acquired super powers.