Today I publish an interview with specialty pioneer George Howell–my fifth post in the CRS Colombian Varietal Cuppings series. This year marks 40 years since he started The Coffee Connection in Boston. The SCAA gave him a lifetime achievement award in 1996 for his uncompromising commitment to coffee quality, but he was hardly done innovating […]
In keeping with the baseball theme from yesterday’s post, here is another analogy between baseball and coffee quality. Don Jaime Molina of the quality-focused 5 de junio cooperative has hit another home run in Las Sabanas: he placed a winning lot at the Nicaragua Cup Of Excellence from his Monte Cristo farm for the fourth […]
The 5 de junio cooperative sees organic specialty coffee as the key to the development of its communities. Its confidence in this vision reflects its belief that its coffee embodies the best its communities have to offer, from the terroir of a coffee origin emerging as one of Nicaragua’s finest, to the generosity, hard work […]
Images from our pulp natural pilot in Nicaragua — this is what innovation looks like in the community of Las Sabanas.
A few weeks after I published a post on Nariño’s domination of the 2010 Colombia Cup of Excellence, the coffee website Sprudge ran an excellent, in-depth piece on the controversy around the varietal of the lot that won the COE.
The Colombia Cup of Excellence competition held earlier this month may have marked the coronation of Nariño as the source of the country’s finest coffee. Farmers from Nariño claimed the first six spots and eight of the top ten. Such dominance leaves little doubt that the center of Colombian coffee has shifted definitively to Nariño.
I am 10 days and about 800 long-slog miles into a visit to the coffeelands in Nicaragua that will end tomorrow when I get on a flight home to Guatemala. One of the highlights of the visit so far was having lunch earlier this week with Don Jaime Molina on his Monte Cristo farm. Jaime placed second at the Nicaragua Cup of Excellence competition in April; a few days before our visit, his coffee sold at auction for $12.55 a pound.
Jaime Molina — a member of the 5 de junio cooperative that participates in the CRS CAFE Livelihoods project — took 2d place in last month’s Nicaragua Cup of Excellence competition. We can’t take credit for Jaime’s coffee, but we sure will work to figure out what exactly he is doing right and try to share it with other farmers in the project. Congratulations, Jaime, and good luck at auction!
