Rats! Just when it seemed like summer was kicking in (it being one of those years when we skip spring), there we were right back into the rain. But it’s WARM rain, right? Or warmER, perhaps?
I’ll be roasting this Sunday and/or Monday, then delivering and shipping Monday afternoon. Please send your orders by Saturday night to be sure of getting your favorites for this time - and also be sure to check the site for what’s available. We’re at the end of the last order of coffee, and the next time you hear from me, we will have some great new coffees to talk about.
I have just a few bags here if you need something before then - Ethiopia and Sulawesi, as I recall.
Into the Blues
The hallucinations began in mid-November as they always do when the clocks change and lighting fires becomes a daily ritual. Warm air. Warm water. COLD Red Stripes. Reggae music. Days on end with no fleece. Snow cones rather than snowblowers. Exiting one’s home without shuddering. The absence of Seasonal Affective Disorder. Colors and leaves and sun and . . .
So it is natural that our thoughts turn to tropical vacations. Tanji and I have found that the act of planning vacations extends the vacation itself, and provides a psychological boost that helps to withstand the Maine winter.
This time, the fantasy was Jamaica, and learning that it was just four hours away (less than a bad afternoon commute in Boston), got us thinking about and then acting on the idea of going there.
I’ve wanted to see that place for years. I’m a huge Bob Marley fan, and I’ve long harbored a curiosity about the Rastafarian religion, the Jamaican form of island culture and the roots of James Bond. But more than any other question, I really wanted to understand what the big deal is about Jamaica Blue Mountain Coffee.
My adventure of being a professional coffee roaster is now a scant three years old, but during this time, I’ve come to a solid understanding of coffee origins, the vast variety of coffee flavors and the factors that contribute to an amazing cup of coffee. I know that every growing region of the world is capable of growing amazing coffee - and I know that, for $20 a pound or less, it is possible, with a little homework, to find pretty close to spectacular roasted coffee from any of these. Further, I have come to understand that coffee is subject to the tribulations of nature, that one year’s amazing crop does not guarantee that the next will be as good, and that the price of a coffee in the market is typically directly proportional to its quality.
As I learned about different coffee sources, the Jamaican origin stuck in my mind. How was it, I wondered, that coffee from the Blue Mountain region could consistently be priced at an astronomical $40/pound from year to year - particularly in the face of the recent weather cycles that have thrown growing conditions there for a loop? Does Jamaica produce truly amazing coffee? Is it always that amazing? Why, with so many other awesome coffee to choose from, do the devotees of this coffee continue to pay these prices? And why did one of the industry’s great authorities on coffee recently characterize all Blue Mountain coffee he had tasted for the last four years to have “no fragrance, no aroma, nor origin flavors, just roast taste” and to say “There's nothing there to encourage me to offer it, at any price.”
Because Tanji is a kind soul, she agreed to let me devote a link of this vacation to the Blue Mountains and my quest for an answer to these questions. And after a week living in a bamboo hut on a cliff in the northeastern community of Boston Bay (the subject of another story), we tucked into our little rental car and set out for The Blues.
Defining Blue Mountain Coffee
JBM’s reputation as a superior coffee is in large part due to the regulations and marketing initiaitves of the Coffee Industry Board of Jamaica. These regulations outline a growing region in a four parish area and in a band of altitude between 3,000 and 5,000 feet, and coffees grown outside these areas must carry other designations (such as Jamaica High Mountain, Jamaica Supreme or Jamaica Low Mountain). Our sense is that counterfeiting (meaning, labeling a less expensive lower grown coffee as JBM) is common, but we also heard that the consequences to those who violate these rules are swift and considerable.
Certified JBM is also rigidly graded by bean size (called “screen size” in the industry) and must be sorted to adhere to a very low defect rate. These requirements are no different than the procedures followed by most growers and producers of good specialty grade coffee.
Getting There
It would deny me the pride I experienced in returning our rental car and getting my ENTIRE deposit back if I didn’t describe the drive from Boston Bay to The Blue Mountains. The obvious and direct route on the map, “Highway” B2 was out as an option because of two landslides, so this dictated that we drive a longer route that would take us through a winding valley, into downtown Kingston, then up, up, up, to our destination in the tiny village of Silver Hill at 6,000 feet. Several thousand twisty curves, approximately 1,000 wandering goats, several dozen spaced Rasta pedestrians, hundreds of impatient (and skilled, I might add) passing Jamaican drivers. As we came around one of the many curves, we suddenly found ourselves at a military checkpoint, where we were required to stop for half an hour while the troops marching in the parade ground beyond finished their drills. The parade ground was actually part of the “Highway”.
The Blues are truly stunning. A dense, layered fog swirls around the mountaintops and through the valleys, giving a magical effect to the lush jungle, and water ran all around us. There were few people and virtually no cars - and after the heat and frenzy of the coast, we felt a wonderful calm settle over us. Our home for these days was the funky Starlight Chalet, a nearly empty inn on a ridgeline above the small town of Silverhill. The inn is surrounded on all sides by mountainsides covered with coffee, bananas and cedar, and it is a magical and tranquil place. After the intensity of the north coast, we needed it.
The Small Farmer
In the Blues, the big coffee estates (Wallenford and Mavis Bank) offer tourist-oriented tours where they explain the history of coffee, walk through the processing steps and the fields and then taste their coffees. I wanted something a little more real, so I had connected with the owner of the much smaller Old Tavern estate and made arrangements to meet him the afternoon of our second day there.
That morning, our friend at the hotel kindly introduced us to her friend Manu Robinson, a longstanding “smallholder” farmer in the village of Silver Hill. I’d been wanting a connection like this for a long time, to the smallest and earliest link in the chain of coffee. I wanted to learn about the lives of very small farmers and get a perspective on a farmer’s relationship with the buyer of his coffee, in this case one of the large estates.
We met Manu sitting on a bridge over the sparkling brook that runs through his town, and liked him instantly. He’d been farming coffee in this valley his whole life, and he had the wonderful and instinctive knowledge of the land, the weather and his crops shared by career farmers everywhere. Manu owns three small farms (about 7 acres each) on the mountains above the town, and he offered to show us one of these and tell us about his experiences as a coffee farmer.
Our climb to the farm took us through the fringes of the village, around the grounds of an abandoned school and then up through a progression of small farms growing coffee, bananas, medicinal plants and vegetables. And after about 1,000 feet of elevation gain, we crested the ridge that defines his farm. The coffee was thick, with mature plants of about 7’ tall (kept at that height to allow hand-picking and defence against the wind) running down both sides of the ridge. The harvest season had just finished, so there were still a few ripe cherries here and there - and alarmingly, a number of plants in bloom, an event that should, in a more predictable climate, still be some months away.
This farm is owned by one of the large estates, and they buy all of the output of the farm and set the price to be received by the farmer. My calculation of what Manu receives for his coffee cherries (he relinquishes them to the processing plant down the valley) equates to about $1.20 per pound of green coffee - exactly the same as the farmers we talked to in the Orosi Valley of Costa Rica a few years ago. The searing inequity in this case was that JBM wholesales for about five times what the coffee in Costa Rica did, and yet the farmers were being paid the same. I asked Manu whether the farmers there had ever tried to organize themselves (potentially to talk about collectively finding a way to get more money), but he said that when they had done this, the discussions broke down right away as a result of squabbling among the farmers and that they had not continued. The payment for this year was also cut in half from last year’s payment (I’d guess because of the sunami in Japan, where half their coffee is sold) without explanation to the farmer.
Manu also talked about the effort it takes to run this farm. The coffee is all picked by hand, and transported down the steep, narrow path we had traveled that morning. Fertilizers and insecticides are also transported manually to the site. (Chemical supports appear to be used on all the farms here - and are necessary for the strength of the plants, to fight infestations and diseases and to maintain crop yields. We did not see any organic coffee farming in Jamaica.) The country has experience two significant hurricanes in the last ten years (an unusual cycle, perhaps another consequence of global warming), which have stripped trees bare of fruit and flowers and decimated the roads and paths needed to run these farms. The effect of these on small farmers in devastating, as they are paid by the estates only after they have delivered their ripe coffee cherries.
I liked his curiosity. It was clear that he had not spent any time with a roaster from outside his country, and we had a great conversation about roasting, brewing methods, methods of processing and fermentation in other countries and the coffee market in general.
After an hour or so at the farm, Manu extended an invitation to come to his home, see his roasting operation and enjoy a cup of his coffee.
As we walked, he spoke with great pride about buying a piece of land in the center of his village some years before and then, with the help of good friends, building his house in a long day of hard work.
The house occupies a nice piece of land above the river, with a yard full of banana and coffee trees. In the back yard sits Manu’s pride and joy, a coffee roaster fashioned from a propane tank, rebar and some strips of metal (see the photo link below). The first batch each day takes about an hour and a half, and those after, about an hour. He can roast twenty pounds at a time, and his wife sells their coffee at a small shop she runs in Kingston.
After sending his son to the store for some sugar, Manu served us each a cup of his coffee. It was roasted slightly dark, sweet from the sugar and with a thick, velvety body. We enjoyed the coffee in the yard of a hard working Jamaican coffee farmer, under a canopy of bananas in a valley thick with coffee trees on all sides, above a beautiful river and under a sunny sky punctuated with the famous mists of The Blue Mountains. It was the best cup of coffee Tanji and I have ever experienced.
The Estate
That afternoon, we went to the home and roastery of Dorothy Twyman, who with her son Alex, owns the Old Tavern Coffee estate, a few miles back down the road toward Kingston. The day was Easter Friday (aka Good Friday to us), and the Twymans were holding a lunch party for their friends in honor of the national holiday. They graciously welcomed us and introduced us to their wonderful social circle.
In contrast to the large Wallenford and Mavis Bank estates, Old Tavern is a self contained operation. The coffee is all grown on a single farm (surrounding the house) managed by Alex. They own a small processing facility where the skin and pulp is stripped from the ripe fruit, and after this step, the wet, green coffee is driven down the mountain to be sun-dried on patios in Kingston (it is too cool in the Blues to do it there) and then brought back to the house to be roasted. Dorothy does all the roasting on a pair of Deidrich 3K roasters, and all of the farm’s output in roasted. Alex has 12 full time employees and brings others (usually family members of his staff) to the farm on a seasonal basis to help with picking and maintenance of the trees. He strikes me as a very caring employer. Old Tavern Estate coffee sells for $30/pound in country and $42/pound by mail (which includes shipping).
After some time at the party, Alex collected all the children (15 or so), and we set off to explore the farm. Our journey took us through terraced hillsides densely planted with coffee that had been strategically pruned to ensure maximum yield and wind protection, and then down through progressively smaller paths, across several creeks to a beautiful jungle waterfall. The kids played in the water, and we talked all things coffee.
And it was a great finish to the day that started with Manu in the mountains high above.
Is it Worth It?
By this point in the trip, I now had enough input to answer my original questions about the coffee and the farming of JBM coffee. We had tasted about ten different variants of the coffee, spoken with cafe owners and farmers, and had an up close look at their growing operations.
Other than our cup at Manu’s farm (embellished certainly by the setting), I was not impressed with any cup of JBM coffee we had on this trip. As is typical of coffee on the road, about half the cups we had were the victim of improper preparation or storage - but the others were just not special. The texture and body were nice, but the coffees themselves were not distinctive, and to my taste, very ordinary tasting. Not a bad cup, but not a great one, and certainly not worth over double what we charge for any of our coffees.
We also met a number of travelers on this trip who swear by this coffee and who believe it is worth the money - and it is, of course, customers like this around the world who keep this coffee alive. My sense is that, for many such people, they see JBM as a consistent single origin - and that they have had little exposure to the amazing (and far lower priced) single source coffees from other countries. They believe (as they Coffee Board would like them to) that this coffee is of the same quality each year (trust me, its not) and their experience is embellished by seeing their coffee shipped in fancy stenciled barrels (another marketing device).
So no, I can’t recommend the coffee. My wish for the farmers of Jamaica is that they be freed of the estate system, and that they had a way to learn about the nuances of coffees from different plant varietals and parts of their farms - and then be paid well to isolate these coffees rather than send them into a pool.
I am encouraged by the news that this year the Wallenford and Mavis Bank estates will transition from government control to private ownership - and I hope that with this change will come some attention to quality.
We’ve posted some pics from the trip here on Flickr if you’d like to have a look.
Thanks for reading and for your support. Have a great weekend!
Kent
