Intelligentsia Coffee is trying to change the lives of coffee farmers, for the better. Making $6,000 is a good year, according to Snr. Arauz - the difference between $1 a pound and $1.49 a pound doesn't seem like much to me, apparently it is.
I really want to go on the tour of their coffee roasting factory in the West Loop.
The grande bazaar:
Coffee buyer Geoff Watts travels the globe looking for a few good beans
The taste on Geoff Watts' tongue was chocolate with a hint of tangerine, very sweet with a full body and “nice acidity.” In other words, delicious. He surveyed the two dozen work-calloused men and women around him and wondered who had put those flavors in the coffee he sniffed, sipped and rated on his clipboard that morning as if it were fine wine.
For the bean buyer from Chicago's Intelligentsia coffee roasters, the mission was to coax these Nicaraguan farmers into producing something he travels the world to find-that consistently excellent cup.
Most of the growers had never tasted their own coffee, which is still unprocessed and unroasted when trucked down the hill from their Las Brumas cooperative. Until recently, they had little idea where it went, who was drinking it, how good it was or how much people in big-city coffeehouses were paying for it.
...Speaking through an interpreter, Watts responded that Las Brumas is “the coffee project I am most proud of” and encouraged the farmers to keep improving the crop by picking only mature beans, washing them thoroughly and processing each batch separately. He then handed over two boxes of clothes and other items donated by Intelligentsia's Chicago employees.Watts and the villagers discussed setting aside 2 cents per pound from Flor Azul sales in Chicago for the community's own development fund. Watts had a health clinic in mind; the farmers said they needed a truck.
Afterward, outside the shack, Arauz told Watts about co-op members' doubts that the extra work Watts wanted them to do would really result in higher prices. “It's difficult to change the tradition of coffee,” Arauz said. “It's difficult to convince farmers used to just throwing it in a sack and taking it to market that they need to clean it, care for it and protect it from bad odors. Sometimes the farmers believe us. Sometimes they don't.”
Arauz said the co-op wanted a written contract that locks in the prices and amounts Watts will buy each year. The farmers were disappointed that he had bought only a third of their crop in 2005. Watts replied with a big promise, saying they could work out a written contract on his next visit. Noting that Intelligentsia's business was growing rapidly, he said the price could be adjusted upwards, but never downwards.
“I will never pay less. I don't care where the market is,” he vowed. “The only thing that could sabotage this relationship is if the improvement [in quality] stopped. The coffee has to perform on the table.”
From the back, one of the farmers expressed the group's anxious desire for a guaranteed, long-term relationship with Intelligentsia by piping up with a single word in English:
“Forever,” he said.
He was referring to the coffee deal, but his choice of words had its roots in the complicated history between Americans and Nicaraguans, one scarred by promises and disappointments. Asked where he learned the word, the farmer said he remembered it from a phrase heard during the time of the U.S.-supported dictator, Anastasio Somoza, whose brutal regime was overthrown in 1979 by leftist Sandinista guerrillas.
“Somoza forever,” the saying went.
