Five questions for….Bernie Diveley, Barista at Coffee Division

Note: “Five Questions for…” is a new article series, consisting of short Q&As to help you get to know the people who work in and around coffee. I send the person ten questions, and he or she gets to pick five to answer (in this case, Diveley chose to answer more than five). Some will be in Portland, others elsewhere. Responses may be edited for grammar, clarity and, if necessary, brevity.

Bernie Diveley works as a barista at Coffee Division, the flagship café for 5 Points Coffee Roasters, at SE Division and 35th Place. Coffee Division is one of my regular stops in Southeast PDX (I wrote about half of my book there). A burgeoning coffee enthusiast, Diveley always seems to have a smile on his face to greet customers. He doesn’t seem to mind answering my coffee questions, and once helped me out by loaning me a coffee documentary on DVD. Originally from Los Angeles, Diveley first came to Portland in 2007.Diveley in action

How did you get into coffee?

When I moved to Portland I quickly realized how much coffee was a part of this city.  I got hired at Peet's on Hawthorne and after having my first natural processed Ethiopian my view of coffee completely changed.  I then worked at Lone Pine Coffee Roasters in Bend for a couple years and I was really able to work on my skills as a barista.

What is your most memorable coffee experience?

My first tasting note when cupping. Snickers!

Who are your biggest influences in coffee?

Duane Sorenson, Geoff Watts, Peter Giuliano, James Hoffman, James Freeman, Paul Katzeff, Michael Phillips and Tom Owens.

What is your specialty as a barista?

My specialty as a barista is remembering to give thanks before pulling a shot or steaming milk. I realize that I'm at the end of a long chain and I know a lot of work went into that chain.  There's a lot to be thankful for when making a drink. The fruit itself, the farmers, the cows, all the harvesting, processing and shipping, the machines, the water, my health. And I respect the customers time and the money they give for a memorable coffee experience.

What do you do when you’re not serving coffee?

Drumming!

What’s your hidden superpower that few people know about?

I do pull ups, push ups and sit ups everyday.  SSHHH...

Where did your last best shot come from (other than at your own shop)?

Flight of Heart espresso from Either/Or (in Sellwood).

What’s the best beer in Portland?

Laurelwood.  Free Range Red – Malty, or Workhorse IPA  - Hoppy

What’s your dream job?

Drummer in a jazz band, like Mel Brown.

And the result

Christopher David Experience Design – the Next Generation of the Multi-Use Space

On hot summer days, now a distant memory, the Pearl District’s Jamison Square teems with activity. From miles around, the park’s wading pool attracts parents who bring their kids to cool their toes and survive the heat. Joyful shrieks of children splashing and frolicking in the water echo off the walls of nearby condos and fill the open space.

When autumn arrives, the pace of activity slows. Pedestrians saunter through the square, holding on to the season’s waning moments of sun and warmth. Leaves turn golden, bathing the plaza with amber in the afternoon light. Streetcars rumble past on schedule, the metal of the steel rails screeching under the weight of the wheels. Sharply-dressed women strut by in heels, slowly, to make sure they are seen. Fit, toned joggers in short shorts and tight tees bounce along the boardwalk. Curious kids clamber up the park’s granite bear, testing their bravery as they climb to the top of the statue before leaping off, like chicks taking their first plunge from the nest. Toddlers wobble along the top of the tan stone wall that splits the square, their mothers leisurely following behind, pushing high-dollar strollers with one hand, and holding smartphones to their ear with the other. Benches surrounding the park fill up with friends, neighbors, and nappers.

Amidst this activity, a new café sits on the northwest corner of the square, waiting to be discovered. The name on the door says Christopher David, Interiors | Floral | Café (CDExD). The shop is a unique concept, a multi-use space that combines the diverse interests and talents of its three owners: Chris Giovarelli (whose first and middle names adorn the door), an interior designer, Cosmin Bisorca, a flower and finance specialist, and Kevin Nichols, a former barista at Nuvrei and Water Avenue Coffee, who oversees the coffee side of the business. I stopped in and was able to chat with Nichols, who shared the story behind the company.

First and foremost, CDExD is dedicated to beauty. The company started out as strictly a design firm, founded by Giovarelli in 2012. Looking to grow the business, Giovarelli knew he needed to get his work in front of the public. “Chris wanted a storefront to showcase his design and have it be a place to show the actual work that he does in people’s homes and businesses,” Nichols told me. “In doing that, we saw the opportunity to have a revenue stream from a small café inside the store, as well as the floral area. We decided to put all three of those together to have it work.”

The three-in-one concept adds an interactive vitality to a space that would otherwise be limited to shoppers quietly perusing furniture and other fixtures. “It’s kind of a collision of worlds—the designer meets the barista meets the floral designer. We all came in under one roof to create a beautiful experience.” said Nichols, adding, “There’s not many places you can go where you can buy a bouquet, a latte, and a sofa.”

The Coffee Business

Naturally, I was curious about the coffee side of the business, so I asked Nichols to share his story too. Originally, from the D.C./Northern Virginia area, Nichols came to Portland in 2007. With a degree in geology from the University of South Carolina, Kevin worked in an environmental testing lab, but he found his job unfulfilling (being holed up in a lab all day did not lead to much human interaction). Outside the lab, he discovered for the first time that coffee could taste good. “Coming here, I first noticed all the latte art, and I was just fascinated by it,” he said. Nichols spent a year abroad in London, during which he decided to switch career paths and get into the coffee business. To get a head start on his new life, Nichols took an intensive course at the London School of Coffee that covered a gamut of topics, from roasting to pulling shots to latte art.

Back in the Rose City, Kevin found a barista job at Nuvrei, where was trained by Matt Higgins, Coava Coffee’s owner (at that time, Nuvrei was a Coava wholesale account). From Nuvrei, Nichols moved to Water Avenue Coffee. When he interviewed for the Water Avenue position, Kevin was clear about his ultimate intentions. “I was honest with them,” he said. “I said my dream is to open up my own place. That’s what I want to do in the next couple years.” That was fine with Milletto and Smyth, who look to hire employees with enthusiasm for coffee, even if it causes them to lose them when they leave to do their own thing.

Less than a year later—much sooner than originally planned—Nichols became a partner in the new business. “I was a little daunted about starting my own place, completely on my own,” Nichols said. “Then this came up—not only the opportunity to work with other people, but to work with friends.” When Nichols told Milletto and Smyth he was leaving to start the new business, they encouraged him to go for it and offered their support.

Click here to see a few more photos of the shop.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the café serves Water Avenue Coffee. Nichols says his choice of coffee was an easy one. “I love the company and the coffee” he explained. “I spent close to a year working there and I just fell in love with the product and the people who work there. I wanted to bring their coffee to the Pearl and I wanted to put their coffee in a beautiful place.”

CDExD is the fourth café to have inhabited the Jamison Square location during the five years I have been in Portland, so I asked Nichols how the new business would be successful where others were not. He said the mix of talents and the experience of the owners gave CDExD an advantage. In addition to selling goods and services, the puts on several classes each month, in home decoration, floral arranging, and coffee (Nichols will be teaching a class on how to brew a pourover at home the next one will be Wednesday, October 23, at 7:00pm. Details about the classes can be found on the company website). CDExD does design and flowers for events as well. The diverse offerings are intended to complement each other.

Time will tell how the three-in-one model works as a business, but Christopher David makes a pleasant stop in the north end of the Pearl. Between the furniture, the flowers, and the coffee, the shop is like a little bit of Paris in the heart of the Pearl. It combines the elegance of the Champs-Élysées with elements of third wave coffee, such as the low counter and the open coffee bar, where baristas make drinks in full view of the customers. I might never have a living room as nice as the showroom floor, but I will happily sit at a table and enjoy the setting for the price of un café.

Vitals
Address: 910 NW 10^th, Portland, OR 97209 (map)
Hours: Monday-Saturday 7am-6pm
            Sunday 8am-5pm
Phone: 503-206-8226
Coffee: Water Avenue
Recommendations? Take your drink and sit outside on a sunny afternoon
Wi-Fi? Yes
Website: CDExD.com 

Video Friday: Unicorn-Free Coffee and Why the Government is Not like a Business

Certifiably Strange (and funny)

A couple videos to help you pass those last few hours of work before the weekend:

First, a link to this video arrived in my inbox last night from Jonathan Sellwood. Rest assured, there won’t be any unicorns in your coffee if you get it from Cellar Door.  

[Side note: Doesn’t Cellar Door’s Jeremy Adams (featured in the video) remind you of Jay Leno?]

Is Government like Business?

The second video is relevant to the battles currently happening in Washington, D.C., over the budget and the debt ceiling. The two main parties have starkly different visions for the role of the government. One sentiment that comes from the Republican side is that government should be run more like a business: “The government spends too much! It should have to balance its budget, just like I do with my business!”

This idea might seem logical, but the reality is a little more complicated. The video below, from OnlineMBA.com, talks about three ways government is different than a business.

Agree?

Disagree?

Thoughts? 

Dovetail Coffee Roasters – Changing the Suburban Coffee Landscape

Conventional wisdom says that compared to downtown Portland, the suburbs surrounding the city are a wilderness for good coffee. Suburban coffee culture is best known for its gargantuan lattes, loads of syrups, and scorched beans. The Starbuckification of the suburbs has made an average cup of coffee ubiquitous, and if you want something better, your best bet is to head closer to downtown, where the quality of a café is inversely proportional to its distance from the Willamette River (roughly).

But not all is bad outside the city limits. The coffee landscape is evolving, even in the suburbs, where it is possible to find people who care about coffee quality. Three of these are Cathy Zellmer, Matt Knight, and Adam Reid. Zellmer and Knight own Dovetail Coffee Roasters, a small wholesale roaster in Beaverton, and Reid owns Origins Coffee House (formerly Coffee’s On – Gresham) in Gresham, Dovetail’s de facto flagship café. Together, Dovetail and Origins are improving the coffee scene on both the western and eastern flanks of Portland. I spent a couple hours at Dovetail’s roastery in Beaverton, to hear what’s happening in the hinterlands.

Matt Knight, Cathy Zellmer, and Adam Reid, at Dovetail headquarters

The Original Coffee Brake

Cathy Zellmer’s plans never included owning a coffee business. For many years, she ran her own independent insurance business, and the only thing she knew about coffee was that she needed lots of it to keep her going each day. Fortunately for Cathy, her office was located across the street from the Original Coffee Brake, a roastery/café founded by Ron Davis in 1993 (one article quotes Zellmer saying that she and her husband, Chuck, would spend between $400-$500 each month on coffee).

In 2004, Zellmer went back to school, with the intention of becoming a lawyer. She earned a degree in Women’s Studies at Portland State, graduating summa cum laude. She applied to law school at Lewis and Clark and prepared for a career in law. Zellmer’s plans quickly swerved off the track in 2008, when Davis announced he was retiring from the coffee business and planned to close his café. Cathy was distraught. More than a café, the Coffee Brake was also a gathering place, a community hub. Zellmer was not about to let it close, and even though she was accepted into law school, she decided to purchase the café instead.

The Coffee Learning Curve

Zellmer had a lot to learn about the coffee business, so Davis stayed around to help her get started. He stayed on as roaster for an interim period, and showed her many things about coffee in general. Seven months after she bought the café, Zellmer attended Coffee Fest in Seattle, attending every educational session she could fit into the schedule. She also drank countless espressos from the booths on the trade show floor. The trip inspired her to improve the quality and consistency of the coffee she was serving, especially the espresso.

As soon as Cathy got back to Portland, she called Matt Milletto, working as a consultant out of the American Barista and Coffee School, to come to the store to train her baristas. “I called Matt and was like, we need your services,” Zellmer recalled. Milletto came to the café and did a training session with the entire staff.

Cathy was pleased with the results. “The next morning I came in to my café,” she said, “and the morning barista was covered head to toe with coffee grounds. She was making beautiful espresso shots and was excitedly telling every customer how we had just taken a giant leap forward and could do a better job than we did the day before. She was so excited.”.

Customers greeted the changes with skepticism, but it didn’t take long for them to come around. Zellmer recalled one customer who was very particular about getting only one shot in his drink. Cathy urged him to try something new. “I put one and a half in,” she said, “because I wanted him to be able to taste the coffee, and it wasn’t so bitter. It was smoother, it was better espresso, and he was looking at me like, ‘What are you doing?’ I told him, I just want you to try this.” Cathy explained why she was doing things differently and told him if he didn’t like it, she would make him another, the old way. Not to worry. “He loved it,” she said.

Zellmer said the biggest key to gaining acceptance of the changes was the attitude of the staff. “If you’re café’s a community, and the community loves you and your people, they’ll follow you anywhere,” she said.

Leaving Retail and Gaining a Business Partner

For about three years, Zellmer ran the café (with some help from her husband, himself very busy as an engineer/manager at LSI) before changing courses again. The retail business was not Cathy’s passion, so she decided to sell the café and focus on the wholesale roasting business, calling her new venture Dovetail Coffee Roasters.

Around the same time, Knight, who has his own insurance business (he and Cathy shared an office for eight years), gradually entered the business. When Cathy and Chuck went on vacation, Matt would help out, making deliveries and shadowing Davis, to learn how to roast. “I worked in it for a few months before I said, ‘I like this,’” he recalled. In 2011, Knight became a co-owner, and now splits his time between roasting coffee and running the insurance business.

For Knight, being a roaster fits his personality. “I focus in and drill down—that’s what I like. I can take the raw product and turn it in to something you enjoy,” he said. In addition to learning from Davis, he also got some lessons from Brandon Smyth, Water Avenue Coffee’s co-owner and head roaster. (Water Avenue’s roaster was broke down one time, so Smyth came to Dovetail to roast while it was getting fixed. Knight used the opportunity to learn as much as he could from Smyth.)

Neither Zellmer nor Knight was worried about the business hurting their relationship. “We’ve always been really good work friends,” said Cathy. “We’ve always had a good business relationship, so we got to know each other that way.” If something goes wrong, they can work through it. “We have a nice foundation, and we’re able to communicate,” Matt said.

Zellmer does not regret her decision to forego law school. Although she says law still interests her, the coffee business fits her personality better. “The thing I love about coffee, is that it’s so organic,” she said. “It’s never the same. The business, the product and what I get to do every day is really organic. I get to be challenged, I get to learn something new, I get to experience something new, I get to grow. For me, it can’t get more interesting than that. I can’t imagine being a lawyer.”

Changing Suburban Coffee Culture

Zellmer and Knight’s goal for Dovetail is to improve the coffee in the suburbs around Portland. They have a willing partner in that vision in Adam Reid, who bought his café in 2011. Reid is clear about his focus for the café. “Our core value is around the coffee, and one of our fun points is showing the customers what we can do with it,” he said.

It wasn’t always that way, though. Originally, Reid planned on running a bubble tea shop, but Zellmer says she convinced him to focus on coffee instead. “He hadn’t developed a palate for coffee,” she said. “He hadn’t learned to appreciate lighter-roasted coffee.”

When Reid first bought the café, it was a typical second wave café, with a wall full of different syrups and lots of dark-roasted coffees. One of the first things he did was to reduce the number of available syrups and lower their visibility.

The coffees changed too. For the first few months they worked together, Zellmer said she and Reid pushed each other over the roast profiles. “Adam would call me and say, ‘You’ve got to roast the coffee darker,’” she said. Reid’s customers were used to darker roasts, and they complained. At first, Zellmer went along, roasting the coffee darker than she liked to. Gradually, however, they slowly changed the roast profiles, lightening them up as customers became accustomed.

Adam brought in Brandon Arends (one of the people who piqued my interest in specialty coffee) to train his baristas. To start coffee conversations with customers, Adam placed a Yama cold brew tower on the counter. In addition, Origins typically offers a single-origin espresso alongside its blend, something of a rarity outside of Portland.

Zellmer was pleased with the changes she has seen at Origins. “In the beginning, they didn’t have the greatest equipment, they didn’t have the greatest baristas, and they didn’t have the greatest coffee,” she said. “So we got to the point where we improved the coffee, and trained the baristas. I walked in there one day…to make some espressos with their people, to make sure we were on the same page. It was very clear to me that they had a high level of skill, that they knew what they were doing.”

Although I spend most of my time in Portland, I probably should not be surprised that better coffee is moving into the suburbs, through the efforts of people like Cathy, Matt, and Adam. As more people are exposed to good coffee in centers like Portland and San Francisco, they will come to expect it in other places too. Entrepreneurs will see an opportunity to stand out in the surrounding areas. If the suburban scene continues to improve, good coffee might someday be as accessible in Beaverton as it is in Downtown Portland (in my caffeine-induced, utopian coffee vision). At the very least, it will be much easier to find.

Coffee Note: When you visit a coffee roaster, it is rare to come away without tasting a few coffees. During the visit, Cathy prepared pourovers of two different Ethiopian coffees. The first, an Ethiopian Yirgacheffe, was almost tea-like, with a light body and hints of peach and citrus. The second, a natural processed Sidamo, stood out for notes of sweet plum. Adam brought some cold brew, a blend of three different coffees—the natural Sidamo, a Flores (from Indonesia), and a Peruvian coffee—that tasted like berries and chocolate. 

Korean Coffee Tour Group Coming to Portland

As it has for centuries, coffee continues to bring people together from all over the world, including here in Portland. The first weekend in October, a group of sixteen Korean coffee professionals is coming to Portland for a tour of the local coffee scene. Sponsored by COFFEE Magazine, based in Seoul, the group is coming to Portland to visit cafés, talk to coffee industry people, and look for ideas to take back to Korea. As I wrote last November, Seoul has one of the fastest-growing coffee cultures in the world, with cafés seemingly everywhere. This is Portland’s opportunity to influence how that culture develops.

(On a related note, today’s Oregonian has an article about the importance of trade with South Korea to the Oregon economy.)

One of my espressos in Seoul last yearThe idea for the tour came from Jinsu Lee, a friend of mine who spent several years in Portland before returning to Korea. He wanted to maintain some ties with Portland, so he approached Mr. Song-dae Hong, the owner and CEO of COFFEE magazine, with the idea of  putting a coffee tour together. The proposal received a great response, and sold out. I am in charge of organizing the Portland leg of the tour, which runs from tonight through Saturday. After visiting Portland, the group heads to Seattle to attend one day of Coffee Fest, before leaving for Seoul on Monday.

The group is sticking to a coffee-based agenda while they are in Portland. We have put together a long list of cafés and roasteries to visit in and around Portland, for both casual and educational visits. (If your café is on our casual stops list, I will give you a heads up at least one day before we visit, so you can pass the word on to your staff that a large group will be coming by.) The tour will be a great opportunity to share Portland with others, and should be a fun cultural exchange, too. If you’re sitting in your favorite café and a bus pulls up and unloads a large group of Korean tourists (and one six-foot-four American), come over and say hello!  

CaffeiNation's Coffee Road Trip Comes to PDX

Do you think you drink a lot of coffee? You might not think so after watching the video below. Brandon Davenport, a barista at the Pancake Epidemic in Los Angeles (serving Stumptown Coffee), and his video-maker, Jesse Meeker, record their road trip around the West, hitting a wide variety coffee stops along the way. The video below is a recap of the duo's Portland stop, the second city on the tour. You might recognize a few of the names and faces (Liam Kenna, who manages Stumptown's Annex, has an especially prominent role).

In total, there are seven videos in the series, covering  San Francisco, Seattle, Spokane, Boulder, Cheyenne, and other cities. The rest of them can be found at CaffeiNation's YouTube page.

Nossa Familia’s New Microlots – Extending the Family beyond Brazil

It’s always fun to learn the story behind a particular coffee or café. For me, the people behind the coffees, whether farmers, roasters, baristas, café owners—even coffee drinkers—are the most intriguing part of the coffee industry and culture. The coffee is great, and learning about it is interesting, but hearing how much people care about what they do is even better. Such is the case with the story behind Nossa Familia’s newest arrival in the company’s Microlot Series. Since 2005, Nossa Familia (“Our Family,” in Portuguese) has been importing and roasting Brazilian coffees from farms run by the family of Augusto Carvalho Dias Carneiro, the company’s owner. Over the last year, Augusto decided to “extend the familia” beyond his family’s farms and into other countries. The latest of the Microlots comes from Finca San José de las Nubes, in the Matagalpa region of Nicaragua. Finca San Jose’s owner, Bayardo Reyes, has one of those stories I find interesting. --WH

Bayardo Reyes grew up in Matagalpa, Nicaragua, a place his family called home for generations. In the early 1920s, his grandfather, Rigoberto, established a coffee farm in the mountains near Matagalpa. Bayardo’s father, Mauricio, later expanded it, but Bayardo’s prospects of carrying on the family legacy looked tenuous after 1979, when the Sandinistas took power. The new government confiscated the family’s land and divided it up among many campesinos (peasants). Knowing little about farming, the new owners did not tend to the land with the same care, and the land was eventually sold or abandoned.

Bayardo Reyes and his mother, Gloria

Nicaragua’s tumultuous times continued into the eighties, as the country went through a civil war (Americans might remember the televised hearings over the Iran-Contra scandal, where the U.S. was secretly selling arms to Iran and channeling the funds to the anti-Sandinista militias (the Contras) in Nicaragua). In 1984, Bayardo’s father died unexpectedly, a blow to the family. Bayardo was just heading into his teenage years, and his mother, Gloria, feared that her son would be pulled into the conflict by forces on either side of the political divide. To protect Bayardo, she sent him to live with an aunt in Miami. Bayardo attended school in Miami, and after graduating from high school, he enrolled in the U.S. Army in 1991, deploying to Somalia soon thereafter, the first of multiple tours in conflict zones (Reyes also went to Iraq in 2003, 2006, and 2009—so much for a mother’s wish to keep her son out of harm’s way).

While Bayardo felt at home in the United States, he wanted to maintain a connection to his roots in Nicaragua. He harbored many fond memories of being around the coffee farm, and wanted to somehow continue the traditions of his family. “It’s a way of life,” Bayardo told me, when I spoke to him over the phone. Reyes asked his mother, still in Nicaragua, to keep an eye out for an opportunity to buy some land that could produce coffee.

At the time, land was cheap in Nicaragua, and in 1991, Bayardo purchased approximately 150 acres in the Matagalpa region, an area well known for its coffee. The farm, at 1200 meters above sea level, was located in a cloud forest, well-situated for producing coffee. “I wanted to help people around there grow coffee and show them what I learned from my dad and granddad,” Bayardo said.

Spreading coffee to dry. Photo courtesy Augusto Carneiro Dias.Military life kept Reyes busy, but Reyes would visit the farm whenever he could, usually 3-4 times each year (except when he was deployed to war zones). Improving the farm was important, but improving the lives of the people in the region was the bigger goal. “The whole thing was never about coffee,” said Bayardo. “It was about helping people, and the coffee made it possible.” After his first stint in the Army, Reyes went to college and studied civil engineering. After getting his degree, Reyes returned to active duty, this time as an officer. Today, Bayardo is a major who specializes in logistics and operations.

Although he does not live on the farm, Reyes is able to keep a fairly close eye on what is happening there. Bayardo travels to Nicaragua a few times each year to work on new projects. His mother monitors the checkbook and makes sure things run smoothly in Bayardo’s absence. Reyes contracts with an agronomist to watch over the health of the plants and prescribe any recommendations. The agronomist, who oversees multiple farms in the region, visits Finca San José every couple weeks and sends Bayardo a status report.

To see more pictures of Finca San Jose, including more of the people who live and work there, click here. All photos in gallery courtesy Bayardo Reyes. 

The farm has undergone many improvements since the early nineties. When Reyes bought the farm, it had no buildings. Over the years, he has put up some structures, including a few houses for employees who work on the farm. Today, ten people live in the farm’s housing (about thirty people work full-time on the farm). Reyes imported solar panels, car batteries, an alternator and a small wind turbine to charge the batteries and provide some electricity. “It was really neat how Bayardo piecemealed it all together from scratch,” said Augusto, when I spoke with him at Nossa Familia’s headquarters. “He knows he can’t depend on the government to bring in power and water and all that.”Inside the office. Photo courtesy Augusto Dias Carneiro.

Helping others is an important part of Finca San José. “The U.S. has given me so much,” Bayardo said. “I want to give back, and this place is where I can make an impact.” Reyes has brought in a cupper to teach neighboring farmers how to gauge the quality of their coffees, so they have a better idea of what their coffees are worth, essential knowledge when negotiating with coffee buyers. Reyes has also helped the neighbors access credit to buy chemicals to improve their crops.

Bayardo encourages his employees to improve their education. He provides on-farm classes for both workers and their children. Having educated workers helps the farm run smoother. “How can I make someone a manager if they can’t read or write?” Reyes said. Five days a week, a teacher visits the farm and gives lessons, in a dedicated classroom area.

One of the challenges for farmers in the area is getting their coffees to the mills (beneficios) in a timely manner. Reyes bought a pickup to haul coffees from Finca San José to the mills. When neighboring farmers help Reyes during harvest, he returns the favor by letting them use the pickup to haul their own coffees.

Whenever he can, Bayardo also uses the farm to create employment for the locals. Before he could get the most out of the pickup, Reyes had to improve the main road leading to the farm. Until last year, anyone who wanted to visit the farm had to walk or ride donkeys the last mile. The soils in the area are mostly clay, and when it rains, the roadbed liquefies, making it impassable. As a civil engineer, Reyes knew how to survey the land and design a better road. Primarily, it needed a lot of rock to solidify the soil. He thought about hiring a company to do the work with heavy equipment, but while it would be done quickly, it would not provide as many jobs for people. Since labor costs were relatively low and the physical work was manageable, Bayardo hired a crew to haul gravel and spread it by hand. The crew spent weeks hauling in loads of rock in with the pickup, shoveling rock onto the clay roadway, until finally they made it up to the farm. “Foot by foot they built this road to access the farm,” said Augusto, admiringly.

Ready to head to the mill. Photo courtesy Augusto Dias Carneiro.Reyes is careful about protecting Finca San José’s resources. Approximately sixty-five percent of the farm has been set aside for conservation. Part of the farm is also dedicated to producing food and other cash crops for the workers on the farms. Reyes recently put in a gray-water recycling system and improved the toilet facilities, to make living conditions more sanitary. “People there looked at me like I was crazy because I spent $3,000 on a bathroom,” he said. Each new thing adds to the overall impact of Reyes’ efforts. “I can’t help a whole country, but I can concentrate on one region,” he said.

Relationship with Nossa Familia

For years, Bayardo subsidized the farm with his own income, but over the last few years, he has grown the project to a bigger scale, with plans to make it self-sustaining. Production on the farm has  grown to 142,000 trees, and costs of running the farm are increasing, so he looked for avenues to increase profitability. In addition to improving the quantity and the quality of the coffees, Reyes also sought out new markets for his coffees. One of the first people he contacted was Augusto. Bayardo’s wife, Yurfa Glenny, had known Augusto since the early 2000s, when they studied together in England. When the SCAA Event was in Portland in 2012, Bayardo and Yurfa came to the show and met with Augusto. The discussions were productive, and it looked like the two sides would get along well.Will, Augusto, and Bayardo. Photo courtesy Augusto Dias Carneiro.

Augusto liked Reyes’ mentality. “Bayardo really wants to focus on quality,” he said. “He’s not doing this because he wants to make a lot from the farm. He’s taking a huge risk, putting all of his savings into this farm.”

Much of the coffee on the farm is shade-grown, which causes it to ripen more slowly and adds to the complexity of the flavors in the coffees. Workers selectively harvest the coffee, to keep underripe and overripe cherries out of the finished product. Reyes says these things are important to potential buyers. “It’s good-quality coffee,” he said.One of Reyes' upcoming projects is to replace the wood stove with a cleaner-burning biogas stove. Photo courtesy Augusto Carneiro Dias.

In order to be eligible for the Microlot series, at least one of the Nossa Familia employees has to have visited the farm before they will agagree to buy the coffee. In the case of Finca San José, both Augusto and Will Schaefer, Nossa Familia’s head of production and assistant roaster, visited, in January 2013. They arrived just in time for the tercera (the third and final round of harvest, that removes the last of the remaining cherries on the branches). Augusto and Will cupped coffees with Bayardo and selected a few lots to purchase. Nossa Familia bought thirty bags in total this year, with plans to buy more in the coming years.

The thirty bags were far from enough to fill a container, which complicated matters, since the cost to move a container is the same whether it contains thirty or three hundred bags. Augusto called the people at Sustainable Harvest to see if they knew anyone bringing a container in from Nicaragua. In a stroke of luck, Sustainable Harvest itself happened to be bringing in a container from Nicaragua, with extra space for about fifty bags. The timing would be a couple months later than Augusto had originally planned, but the money Nossa Familia saved by splitting the shipping cost with the Portland-based importer was worth it.

After Augusto and Bayardo settled on a price for the coffee, Nossa Familia added $900 to the final agreement, so that Reyes could build three new greenhouses on the farm. The greenhouses double as coffee-drying rooms during harvest. “It improves the quality of the coffee, and allows him to get a higher amount of coffee that’s really high quality,” said Augusto. The greenhouses are used only three to four months out of the year for drying and the other part of the year, they can be used to grow vegetables and new coffee starts. “It’s so humid and there is a risk of rain, so [the greenhouses] remove the risk of rain, increases the area you dry in, and then it has the social benefit of being able to produce better food for the people there,” explained Augusto. “For us, it’s the perfect fit—coffee quality and social aspect, which we really like.”

For Augusto and the Nossa Familia team, adding another country to the lineup adds a degree of complexity to the lineup, but it also adds a new dimension to the coffees that customers can try. The Finca San José coffee will be sold by itself, and also as a component of the company’s Full Cycle espresso blend. (When I tried the Finca San José coffee, it was very chocolaty, with a distinct flavor of orange peel.) Nossa Familia wants to work with growers like Reyes, who share similar values. “We want the coffee to be really good,” said Augusto. “We want it to be from…a place where people are treated fairly, and where we understand the supply chain and are comfortable there’s nobody getting exploited in the middle.”

Working with Nossa Familia is the beginning of a new era for Finca San José. In the future, Reyes wants to partner with additional roasters who share similar values and are also looking for long-term relationships. “I want to have a continuous relationship with people,” Bayardo said. “I want to be able to take people to the farm and show them exactly where their coffee was grown.”

If he can reach a point where the farm pays for itself, Bayardo will be happy. “It’s not about the money,” he said. “It’s about the impact you can have in someone’s life.”

Nossa Familia sells coffees from Finca San Jose at Nossa Familia’s espresso bar, at New Seasons (on a rotating basis), and through the company’s website.