Coffee.

[rudemonk]

A few years back when I first started going down to Jamaica on business, friends and family began to ask me to bring back coffee for them. at first, it was a pound or two, and quickly it mushroomed well out of control.

I wasn't really even a coffee drinker myself- I mean, I had done some studying in Venice, and while there I picked up the habit of morning espresso, and of course my family being half sicilian there was always bitter cigars, nuts, fruits, and coffee after Sunday meals...

Just before one trip, the abbot of my temple came to me, and asked if I could bring back some for him.

"Hengfa, you go to Jamaica, yes?"
"Yes Sifu."
"Can you bring back coffee for your handsome Sifu?"
"Of course Sifu...how much do you want?"

For a split second, he contemplated this question, then spread his arms out as wide as possible, and goes, "How about THIS much? you have this kind of chi yes?"

I laughed at the sight of him, standing there, arms stretched out, eyes beaming.

"Yes Sifu, I have that kind of chi..." BUT I really had no idea how I was supposed to bring back such a HUGE amount of coffee which his gesture was suggesting...but when the Abbot of a Shaolin Temple gives you a request, you have some hoops to jump through to meet it, lol...

So when I got down I decided I had to find out what the hell all the fuss was about.

Now, there was an Italian joint we had stumbled on which Mr. Slice had turned us onto, and I put up the post about the Morass...so you may have caught my opinion in there that Luca had the best espresso and cappucino that I had had outside of Venice- and that is saying something, let me tell you. I lived in Venice right next door, or rather, around the canal, from one of the last Gondolerias working in Venice. Every morning the workers would come, work on their boats, take siesta at the bars and cafes, and then go back to it for a few hours, and then retire back to the cafes. There was one cafe where, for like 4 bucks you'd get a thick slice of salami, local cheese, espresso or local wine.

Anyway, even I could tell that Luca had something going on here...I wanted to find out where he was getting his coffee from, because now I had been commissioned to bring back "THIS much" coffee, I didn't want to get a hundred little Jablum sacks, lol...I figured there must be some distributor, like a food warehouse or restaurant supply.

I wasn't thinking Jamaica, lol, I was still in a NYMFC mindset.

Well Luca was reticent to tell me, and he changed the subject when I suggested he procure a big bag for me...I was on my own, lol...

Eventually, I figured out who Luca was getting his coffee from. Negril is a small town, and you can't really keep secrets there for very long, lol...We became friends, and I eventually decided to help him out, because he was living in a rental yard, he had come down from the Blue Mountains because he was tired of getting paid peanuts for his coffee when it came from the best elevation, and I was looking for a way to augment my business concerns down there, and find some means of self sufficiency for a potential monastery/orphanage. I was aware of several successful business models employed by the Catholic monastic orders- for example the Trappists have Chimay, arguably one of the world's finest ales. Why not coffee?

One morning my friend came to see me. Problem was, he wasn't my friend yet, lol...and it was 5AM. I had just laid down. There's a knock.

I ignore.

Another knock.

Damn, I have to get this I guess. But where I am, it's not a hotel...I'm in my apartment...so who could this be? The only response to my questions as to who it was was another knock.

Now I am a little nervous. I pull out my machette and approach the door. Whoever this is, they better tell who the f they are...

I ask again, I get another knock.

I ask again:"Whoever is at my door you better identify yourself right f'ing NOW."

Finally, in a hushed voice, "It's the entertainment coordinator."

???? I wasn't aware of any "Entertainment Coordinator" on this property, but the voice seemed very familiar. The light was on in the hall, and from under the door I could see there was only one person. Still, the hallway turned...the voice was from a chick, but there could be ten ****'s heaped up out of sight...but then the feet were bare...

I slowly eased the chain off the door.

I twisted the knob, swung the door in and leaped back with the machette- and saw "Lucky."

Well that explains the voice recog, as I had met her a while back...but what was she doing here...?

She says I am to go to the gate, because my friend was there.

She looks at the machette, her one eye half shut- she had clearly been woken up...meanwhile I am trying to process what she just said. Friend? At the gate at dawn?

Lucky turns, half looks at me in my boxers and bill, lol, and walks off...turns out she has a phone in her room so the gate called her to get me.

I still had no idea who was at the gate, I mean, it could have been anyone. Wouldn't be the first time somebody I met for like 5 minutes tracked me down.

So I stash the machette and get to a place where I can see the gate. I don't recognize the person.

Well, this isn't going away obviously, so I get dressed and come down.

It's the coffee guy, and a mutual friend told him to come get me, because he is going up to his farm to get coffee to roast tomorrow...and I must flim it.

"Flim it?"
"Yes mon...you are to flim it."

"Okay."

I had no idea what the hell he was talking about. This was going to be something though, that was easy to see- the name he gave me of the connection checked out, I knew this guy was trying to set this up for me, but the timing SUCKED...even so I thought, I better go with him. I grabbed my gear- a GL1, a digital camera...my knapsack...do I bring the machette...cash...how much cash? Am I tagging along here or am I paying...

I hear the car honking...

Well, that was my first trip up to the mountains. I've been quite a few times now, and with a recent hard drive crash, it looks like I am going to have to go a few more times too, lol, to replace all the tracking material I shot for a website we're developing. We'll test the waters and see what we can make of this.

A few of those times were pretty adventurous indeed- M16s pointed at our chests at a police roadblock in Trelawny comes to mind, lol...

Already we've done pretty good, I've gotten him out of his rental, we're registering, taking care of a lot of beaurocratic BS that is major boring crapola...

Anyway since you hardly see any trips up to the mountains, I thought I'd throw this up there...

The trips we make usually take us all day and into the night. We leave Negril, head out through Ochi, up the mountains, then back the Mobay way...we make a big loop. It's a haul but you can do it.



There are a number of spots from the road from which you can stop and admire all the amazing views- there is one major road which winds through the mtns- the Blue Mountain, Catherine's peak...John Crow Mountain...and this is one of those shots.



some shots taken while trying to beat the sunset or the rainclouds, lol...





I wonder how this one fared in Ivan...

and this one...

[rudemonk]

Re: Coffee.

Because the landscape is so severe, in many places deep valleys separate the peaks and the people...so they built these suspension bridges to get from one mountainside to the other.

They're metal, steel I guess, and when you walk across them they start to bounce. A little weird.



Some more homes...



up on one of the peaks...



There is a lot of rainfall. Clouds come out of nowhere, dump their load of rain and speed off. The landscape is magnificent. I have been all over this world- the US, parts of Asia, Europe, Canada...I have yet to see a land so rich and abundant. The earth just produces fruit untended. If ever there was a Garden of Eden, the Blue Mountains are an exemplar. After the rain on one trip, I was standing with one of the big coffee men, and a rainbow materialized right before us...as the fallen rain collects on the mountainsides, it gathers into waterfalls that basically erupt from the foliage. So you can be standing there, and if you catch the timing just right, and God smiles on you, you could be just standing there looking at the trees and suddenly you get a waterfall.




pigs.



Here is the farm, on John Crow...you will notice how vertical the slope is. I asked my friend how the hell they farm this. Do they use ropes? His answer was, it's steep, but still they farm it.

Coffee trees, like everything else, grow about in many spots. There could be one right on the road, and everyone knows whose tree it is, and someone will come along and tend it.

[rudemonk]

Re: Coffee.

Another nice waterfall...



and another...there are more waterfalls than you can shake a stick at, lol...



The sky. Pretty much says it all.



Eventually, we wind our way to the family house, which looks out to the opposite mountainside to view the farm.

This is the backyard view.



We usually work things out to grab dinner from my friend's sister. She is quite the cook, and when she heard I liked to train hot pepper style, she had this little beauty ready...



The family stove.

[rudemonk]

Re: Coffee.

Here is a shot of one of the big estates. Recently I found out that there is really only one estate coffee available in Jamaica. Well, actually two, but one of them is only available in an underground word of mouth kind of way.

Even though there are a few brands which use the word "estate" for a coffee to really be considered as such by connousiers, it has to come from one farm. Most of the farmers are in a loose co-op kind of arrangement- they sell their beans into the coffee banks, who then sell it on the market.

The gentleman who owns this estate gets fairly ridiculous sums of money- up to 40 bucks a lb, roasted, at his gate.

When I show this picture to some of my coffee friends, they pitch tents.



A house on our way back down, after picking up a sack of coffee.



Most of the land here was given over to the slaves when they were given their freedom. Mostly they just continued on doing their farming, but they were mostly illiterate. A few decades ago, some real bastardos discovered that very few of them had filed any claims to the land, and swept in and bought it out from under them. That's how a lot of farms got swallowed up into the big ones that exist now.

On one of the peaks, there is a little known chapel, sometimes tourists come through it, but I've never seen them there...in any case it is like a shrine to coffee...here is a picture of the man they call the "Founder." He is like the grandfather of the mountain farming families.



Also in the Chapel there are some Rasta icons...

St. Michael:



And here is HRH Selassie:



I had to lift those last two off DV so the quality is not that great.

Now we are heading down from the mountains. We have our coffee, and it is time to sort it.

Unlike the bigger co-ops, the beans from my friend's farm are pretty raw. They are all hand processed. There's no sorter, no pulper- all that is done by hand. Basically, what is called the cherry, is picked from the tree. Trees bear fruit twice a year, on their own cycle, there isn't exactly a season per se.

Once the cherry gets picked, the outer skins are mashed off, the beans washed down, and then dried in the sun.

This is the abridged version, lol...it's a long, labor intensive process, and once I got involved I thought the prices for coffee were ridiculously low, lol...and I soon saw why my friend often grew a little frustrated when people tried to chew him down all the time. I mean, you haven't even started roasting yet, lol...

Once you get the sacks together, the beans have to be sorted out. Basically you spread out the beans, and by hand, you pick through them, removing any beans that had weevils or that look soft or shabby. Some of the big farms have machines which sort through the broadbeans and the peaberries, match them up by size, etc. My friend's farm is completely artisanal- it's all hand processed- he used to just let the peaberry sit but when I saw how much peaberry he was getting I basically told him if this was going to work out for us he would have to figure out some way to get them separated.

Basically, coffee beans come in two varieties- broad and pea, so named because well, it looks like a pea. Peaberries are round, while broad bean is flat or squashed on one side. It is very very difficult to sort peaberries out of broad. You have to have a good eye for detail and a lot of patience. Coffee heads will know that the peaberry is considered the best coffee, and so obvioulsy a JBMPB, as it is known in shorthand, lol, commands the highest prices. It's pretty rare to begin with, there is a long growing season, and the Japanese go nuts for JBM as it is, so they sweep in and corner the market whenever they can.

Once the coffee gets sorted out to peaberry or broad, it's usually put in burlap, or a plastic thread burlap equivalent, in 80lb sortings. a lot of times it's an old rice sack.

Here is Kingston, at night...

[Marilyn]

Re: Coffee.

Things I would never see but through your eyes.
This picture is awesome

[rudemonk]

Re: Coffee.

so now we are down from the mountains and are back in Negril.

We are to begin going over the beans we brought down, to prepare them for roasting.

This basically means we are going to meet up in the yard, nice and early. Great.

Here is the area in which we are going to work. There is a big sort of table like structure, stretched with screen. The beans get poured out in increments, and we go to work picking through them.



We get ready to pour out some of the coffee. This is broad and some peaberry mixed- this is before I could convince them of the economic loss they were taking by leaving it mixed.

As you can see in this shot, the beans get poured out onto a screen.



Now that about 20-30lbs are poured out, they get pushed up into the middle, and by pulling out small piles they get picked through, the picked through beans get pushed towards the outside.



Picking through...


The beans are very cool...I kept the sack in my room, which has decent AC, although I never thought that the first two years I was down in JA, lol...and this morning is quite hot and getting hotter, so everyone working is loving the feeling of sliding our hands through the coffee, it's sort of massage...and I'm reminded of an iron palm exercise where you slam your palms into piles of beans, then iron balls...



Some closeups:

[rudemonk]

Re: Coffee.

In that last closeup you can see how there is some peaberry mixed in with all that broad bean.

At first, i could not really tell much difference in the taste, but now that I am like a JBM daily drinker, the difference is slightly more evident. It goes without saying I enjoy the peaberry.

When you find a 'bad' bean, you remove it from the pile and toss it. Some companies keep it and offer it for sale at a slashed price.





different angle:


As I'm sure you can imagine, this is a thankless task. It's hot. You have to lean over the beans...and you have to pay attention, you can't wander off, or you miss bad beans.

It takes us about 3 hours to go through the one sack of 80lbs.



Here is a closeup of some bad beans. As you can see, some look like they have been bored through with little holes. That is because they have been. A kind of beetle or weevil does that, and these beans do not make the cut.



My friend is pretty exacting. At a certain point, you're just like, COME ON...but he keeps picking through, and if he feels like one of his helpers didn't do that good a job he'll sort through their pile too, lol...

[MaryC]

Re: Coffee.

Rudemoonk this report is great. I never began to think what it takes, or how the process begins to make coffee. I knew coffee beans came from a tree, but never the painstaking process before its roasted. Thank you for this report and the time you've taken to do it.

[Laurel]

Re: Coffee.

RudeMonk - as always, I am thrilled to be on another adventure with you!

I want to experience the Blue Mountains one day ... your story and the photos have once again wet my appetite for that journey.

[NapiHead327]

Re: Coffee.

As I read, I can smell the coffee. But I'm sure the aroma I have in memory is nowhere close to that of real life. I can't wait for the trip this Nov. Thanks Monk.

[NapiHead327]

Re: Coffee.



I wonder if I could wash my hair in one of those waterfalls?

[queenb]

Re: Coffee.

Wow! I am a coffee purist, no sugar or cream; and I must have at least 2 big mug fulls every day that my eyes open. I had no idea...

[Vi]

Re: Coffee.

Monk...I can see myself, off to the side quietly watching this process. Standing there in the heat of the day, listening to the exchange of dialogue…if there was any. Very informative Monk, I now have a greater appreciation for what goes into processing the coffee. The sight and sounds of the waterfalls must have been breathtaking. Thanks for sharing.

[djrosen1]

Re: Coffee.

Wow. Thanks, rudemonk.

[geocox]

Re: Coffee.

In a time when this board is very flat,Mr Monk, you are bring back the adventurous side of traveling to Jamaica.
I love your observations; I’m enchanted with your story telling. What a gift you have

Thank you..... … I’ll just sit back and wait for your story to continue…

Geo