I’m gonna level with you right now: when we started planning the Learning Lab origin trip, my primary motivation was pretty selfish. I love traveling, and I especially love traveling for work, when I can actually get paid to do the thing I love. The fact that my job has allowed me to combine my love of travel with a livelihood that helps pay my bills–I recognize this is nothing short of incredible. And I love that my work helps connect those who love coffee to a deeper appreciation for it as they learn where it comes from and how to perfect their brewing. So in many ways, planning the trip didn’t feel much like work; it was like planning an adventure for myself and then getting to include other people as a bonus.
I also had no idea what kind of folks we would attract by marketing an educational coffee journey to the general public. People on the Learning Lab’s email list would get the invitation first, and then anyone who happened to see a small poster hung on a handful of bulletin boards around Traverse City. Higher Grounds’ wholesale partners were invited. And then an email blast went out to the entire HG mailing list. We had room for about eight people, but I knew we’d be happy with six.
For a few weeks, it was crickets. No email inquiries, nobody paying the deposit. I wondered if the trip would really happen. Then I got an email from one interested party, and soon another. And as I was sitting at my mother-in-law’s kitchen table on a trip to the U.P. in August, my phone pinged. Our first official signup, the first deposit paid! Suddenly it was real. We needed at least a couple more to make it work, but now I had hope.
It wasn’t long before we hit our target of six official participants. Along with three of us guides, that would make a gang of nine. We would all fit in one van, and our budget aligned. Over the next few months, we got busy finalizing the itinerary and logistics. And on February 8, our motley crew gathered at Frida’s Mexican restaurant in Antigua, Guatemala, a bit travel-weary but excited to dive in (so overstimulated, in fact, that we neglected to take a group photo).
The next morning, after a good night’s rest at Chica Bean’s Airbnb on their property in Santa Lucia Milpas Altas, we started our day with a tropical fruit tasting–a sensory introduction to the flavors of Guatemala. Tiny sweet bananas, papaya, cherimoya, zapote (more like a sweet potato than a fruit in my opinion), and three types of mangoes! After breakfast (and coffee, of course) in the Chica Bean cafe, Abbi regaled us with coffee’s origin story, a useful frame for the jigsaw puzzle of coffee knowledge we’d build over the next few days. We conducted a cupping (comparative tasting of coffees processed differently) and another tasting of different roast levels; we started to fill in the puzzle.
Our second full day brought a roastery tour in the morning (another piece of the puzzle!) and then travel, as we piled into Chica Bean’s busita (little bus, more like a large van) and pickup truck for the trek to Jalapa, about four hours west and a little north. With clear roads and little traffic, it might have been three hours. A different day it could have been five. You just never know in Guatemala!
From Jalapa the next day, we hopped back in the van (and then the back of the pickup) to reach our destination for the day, the coffee farm of Dona Maritza. Here our task was to harvest a small plot of coffee, the final harvest from these particular plants for the season. We were instructed to pick every single cherry from each tree, separating the best quality ripe cherries (mostly red, but some yellow from another plant variety) into one sack, and everything else (unripes, overripes, damaged fruit) into another. We got to work.
After about four hours of work, not counting a lunch break in the middle, our team of ten (the original group plus Josue, Chica Bean’s founder and son of Dona Maritza) had collected 120 pounds of ripe cherries. Forty labor hours netted us enough fruit for about 20 pounds of roasted coffee. Do you want to calculate that cost of goods?
The cosecha (harvest) puzzle piece was a big one. Participating in this very manual, tedious labor for even half a day provided a huge piece of context for the entire coffee industry. Sure, we could have worked faster, been less careful about separating quality fruit from the rest; we could have worried less about leaving the cherry stem intact on the branch as we picked. But a messy sack of mixed cherries means more sorting later, or a lower quality product. The cherry’s stem becomes the next year’s flower, and therefore the next year’s fruit; by pulling it off we’d be stealing cherries from the next harvest. Attention to these small details is just one essential variable in the vast circle of coffee’s value chain. While I’m sure that more experienced pickers can collect uniform cherry in less time than we did, it was a valuable lesson to carry with us into every cup of coffee we drink.
In the evening, after gathering around Dona Maritza’s kitchen table for a cup of coffee and a snack, we traveled to where she completes the next step of processing: removing the outer skin from the fruit and ultimately laying it out to dry on a cement patio.
Our batch was destined for “honey” processing, meaning much of the sticky mucilage is left intact, allowing more fruit contact with the seed throughout fermentation and drying. We took turns skimming off defective fruit in a tank (bad seeds float instead of sinking), hoisting buckets of fruit into the huller, and raking it out into a shallow layer on the patio.
Upon journeying back to Antigua for some tourist time, several of us did a little tour of specialty cafes. Here in Guatemala, as in some other coffee-producing countries, specialty cafes are becoming more and more prominent as appreciation for high quality coffee grows among both citizens and visitors. While you can still find commercial-grade local coffee served at many restaurants and hotels, you can also find Western-style, third-wave cafes offering pour overs and carefully-crafted espresso, complete with latte art–for U.S. prices.
I have mixed feelings about that. Mostly I think it’s great for locals here to be able to appreciate the incredible coffees that are produced right around the corner, and not just the lower-quality commercial coffee that doesn’t fetch a high price on the global market and so therefore gets sold here on the grocery store shelf. But is it really accessible if it costs three times as much? Are locals here earning enough money to afford more than the occasional splurge, or are these Instagram-worthy cafes only in business because of tourists? I’m not sure. But I do wonder.
These cafes are yet another intricate piece of the coffee jigsaw. While we didn’t fully complete the puzzle on this origin trip, our travelers reported that they now have a much clearer picture of what it takes for coffee to make its way to our mugs. And that truly was the goal of this trip: to connect coffee drinkers to the source. By all measures, our first origin trip was a success. We’re already looking forward to the next one.