A Fun Visit to Redding Roasters

Yesterday I had a meeting at O'Neil's, the much-loved sandwich shop in Bethel, CT. While standing at the counter, ordering green tea, the coffee delivery from Redding Roasters Coffee Company arrived. I got to chatting with the lovely lady delivering the coffee, and she invited me to come by the shop, which I am glad I did.

Bill O'Keefe, the owner, was happy to show me around. I was asking questions about how we go about getting our coffee decaffeinated. Have you ever wondered about that? Turns out there is a big plant in Canada that does (unintuituvely) Swiss water process and another big plant in Mexico that does (intuitively) Mexican water process decaffeination. I have much to learn.

Bill was kind enough to show me the difference in the beans. The Swiss water process is on the left. The Mexican water process is on the right. He said the Swiss is supposed to be the gold-standard, but he sells both. They roast up differently.

The big decision we are going to need to make is to decide whether our beans are (objectively) good enough to import and private label or whether we should just sell them as a commodity in Nicaragua to the beneficios. Bill agreed to roast some of our beans when I finally get some green beans here, and give me his objective assessment.

Growing Coffee from Seed

As I mentioned in a previous post, we wound up starting about 100,000 plants from seeds last year. I get pretty excited when I see the "viveros" (nurseries).  It is better to wait until the rainy season to start seeds, so you don't have to do a lot of manual watering.

What we found out is that it really is best if you can start seeds in your own soil. The plants do better if you start them in the same type of soil as they are going to live in later.

You have to start the seeds in the local soil, after the rainy season begins, which in our region (Matagalpa state) starts in April.

Starting plants from seeds.

In the photo above, you can see the seeds sitting on top of the tiny green stem of the plant. In some cases, you can see the seed shell coming off the first set of leaves. When the seedling gets to be about 4" tall above the level of the soil, with two leaves, it is transplanted.   It is important to make sure you only keep the plants which have ONE root (a "bifurcated", or double root, is not a plant that will grow well).  You can see the date in that photo above is 7/30/2010. We should have started these sooner, but last year is the year that we bought 100,000 plants and lost 60,000 to fungus. It takes about 4-5 weeks for the plants to be ready for transplantation.

The seedlings are out of the common bed of soil, ready to go into their own individual bags of soil.

The seedlings after they have been transplanted into their own bags. You can see the row of bags in the back of the photos has the most immature plants.

This is a vivero of very young plants. They thrive in filtered sunlight with daily waterings from Mother Nature, and from us, if it doesn't rain on time.

These plants are bigger. They have four leaves on them.

If you are patient, and lucky, and the weather is good, and about a billion other things go right, your plants eventually look like this:

Coffee plants ready to be transplanted.

Can you see why I get excited?  Below you can see how the plants look once they have been transferred to the soil of the farm. 

You can see one of our young coffee plants next to the scarecrow that one of our workers has carved with a machete into this tree stump. The scarecrows are carved to scare away the devil. The wood is infiltrated with a particular type of fungus that makes it soft that makes it look black and furry. You can also see some young coffee plants behind the scarecrow, under the older trees.

We have yellow coffee cherries!

Right in the middle of our debate about whether to plant the beans (which are actually seeds, not beans) from the mature coffee plants on the farm, our business manager in Nicaragua, Alex, sent us some photos of the other types of mature coffee on the farm: the plants that produce yellow coffee cherries! I had never seen yellow coffee cherries before.

Yellow (yes, these are RIPE) coffee cherries on one of our plants!

Alex said he was not sure of the variety, but a short Google search found me this:

The closest thing I could find to our yellow coffee cherries (from http://www.coffeeresearch.org/agriculture/varietals.htm).

The beans in the bottom photo are called Amarello, and they are a mutation on the Brazillian Bourbon bean. I was able to find quite a few sites selling "sweet yellow bourbon beans." So ... that might be what we have. We will probably have to send a sample somewhere to have it tested.

This, of course, complicates our decision about what seeds to start next. We will have about 1000lbs of coffee from the yellow cherries, so we could plant this year's crop of plants from the yellow beans. We just need to figure out which plant give us the highest quality coffee on our soil at our elevation.

Why You Should Look for Shade-Grown Coffee

All our coffee is shade grown. In fact, it is such a rustic, natural farm with so much original native vegetation, that you almost can't find the coffee plants in this picture:

Coffee plants in between native bananas and old-growth trees.

On our farm, high in the mountains of Nicaragua, all the original old-growth trees are left alone. Previous owners started to clear some of the old-growth trees, despite very strict and strictly enforced regulations about cutting down old trees. When we purchased the land, there were quite a few human-felled trees and some Hurricane-Felix-felled trees. Since we purchased the land, we haven't cleared any old-growth trees. We do clear out some of the low-growing vegetation to make room for coffee plants, but as you can see from the photo above, coffee lives in a rich polyculture of indigenous vegetation.

Here I am in that same place as the photo above, with a young coffee plant in front of me. Notice that you could barely see it before I pointed it out.

The Seattle Audubon Society has a fascinating web page about why farmers should grow and you should buy shade-grown coffee. The Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center has created a certification that we are pursuing that certifies coffee "shade grown, bird friendly." It turns out that coffee originally grew entirely in the shade. Recently, varieties of coffee were developed that thrived in full sunshine. The point of full-sun coffee was to increase yields. In fact, coffee plants that grow in full sun can produce up to 3 times as much coffee in a year, however, when these plants were introduced, along with them came the need for more fertilizers, herbicides, insecticides, and fungicides. Additionally, the soil was depleted by the plants, and there was more run-off of chemicals into the local water supplies. If you have seen Food Inc., or any other documentary about how the pursuit of higher-yielding plants and livestock have resulted in a more abundant but inferior food supply, then you know the story.

By sticking to shade-grown coffee, we follow the traditions of the native Nicaraguans, and we also protect the soil and water, not to mention protecting the native bird habitats by keeping intact the diverse vegetation that the birds require.

Young coffee plant. Notice the shade from bananas and other native trees falling across the bush.

Also, if great taste is what you seek in a cup of coffee, any professional coffee taster will tell you that shade-grown coffee is a richer, more nuanced cup of coffee than full-sun-grown coffee.