Alex's Coffee Adventure

Today I arrived to El Fénix, a coffee farm and cooperative in Calarca, Quindio Colombia where I’ll be spending my next five weeks. I am thrilled to be here and today made me so excited for what’s to come this summer.

I have a bit more of a sense of what I’ll be doing over these 5 weeks, and my responsibilities will include:

Agricultural work, like

• Picking cherries (I start tomorrow at 6am!)
• Weeding trees
• Fertilizing
• Pruning
• Planting new trees

Coffee production, including:

• Processing cherries (I did some of this today, check out the pics below!)
• Coffee fermentation (lots of blog posts on this to come)
• Drying coffees
• Producing cascara (dried coffee cherry used for tea)
• Sorting and grading for quality

Building new projects and improving existing ones, like:

• Working on the organic vegetable garden (today I planted a bunch of corn!)
• Building a water treatment system for pulp-ey coffee water runoff so it doesn’t kill trees
• Building a composting pit and worm farm

And getting to do some other incredible educational stuff, like:

• Touring and understanding the Colombian coffee association buying system
• Visiting nearby towns and coffee cooperatives
• Roasting samples
• Learning about dry mill grading
• Watching first-hand how exporting contracts are drafted and agreed to

It’s going to be absolutely incredible. My hosts are Miguel and Alejandro Fajardo, brothers who are currently running the farm. Miguel runs the Colombia branch of Raw Materials Coffee, which has grown to include specialty exporting systems in four countries. I highly encourage you to check out their website. So far they can export about 17 containers worth of specialty coffee in a year paying a guaranteed above-market (and above fair trade) price of 100,000 pesos per 60 kilos of parchment coffee, so long as it ends up meeting their quality standards.

I’ll write a lot about what Raw Materials does in the coming days as well, but for now I just can’t wait for this incredible opportunity. I have 5 full weeks to immerse myself in the mechanics, agronomy, economics and (perhaps most importantly) labor of coffee production, and I couldn’t be more excited.

Miguel and Alejandro have already proven themselves incredibly gracious hosts, and Miguel has assured me that I am here to learn and that I’m going to learn as much as I can. For now, I’m going to be learning mostly by following coffee workers (harvesters/producers) and mimicking what they do, but I’ll go on to get to experiment with some of the coffee and tour around the coffee region of Quindio.

Ok, so it’s going to be awesome. I’ll write much more about what it’s like here and daily life soon, but for now I just wanted to write down all the incredible things to come.

Here are some pictures:

Wow it actually took 17 minutes for those pictures to upload. I’m blogging from my phone (on 3 bars of 3G) because we don’t have WiFi here yet, but WiFi is supposed to be installed this week which is exciting. Biggest bummer so far: I won’t get to watch the Democratic primary debate tomorrow night.

I have to be up at 5:30 to start picking coffee cherries, so it’s bedtime for me! There are many many incredible blog posts to come very soon and I can’t wait to share them with you.

Have a good one!

Alex