Alex's Coffee Adventure

Life on the coffee farm has been humming along! I have been working away at all of many things to do here, so I’ll try to share some updates here. I don’t have any good unifying theme for this post, but it will hopefully read as a fun collection of stories from El Fénix.

The Hole!

As I mentioned in the last post, Alejandro and I have been working on a water filtration system for runoff water from the wet mill. The runoff water’s high acidity and dirtiness make it very unhealthy for plants and kills most coffee trees in its runoff path. Well, we’re well on our way to finishing the first of 3 filtration tanks, and today Miguel and I finished up the pipework for the intake and overflow pipes.

The only things left to do are fill the first hole with rocks and cover it. The rocks will help capture some of the solids in the runoff and do a first cleanliness pass. After that, we’ll dig one hole for natural filtration through sand and de-acidification with water lilies and a final hole for fish and algae.

Some coffee is gone!

Miguel and I packed up 7 and a half bags of coffee that’s ready to go to the dry mill. It’s hard work because the coffee dries on raised beds in greenhouses, which get extremely hot during the day (to the point where I was drenched with sweat). Walking out of the greenhouse to the temperate 72º weather of the Andean mountains feels like entering a walk-in refrigerator – the temperature difference is that stark. After packing them, we carried them up to the warehouse to get picked up for delivery soon. The bags are about 100lbs each, and the jute sacks are not especially wieldy, so carrying them up the hill was pretty hard!

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This wasn’t the coffee that I’ve been processing – it was on the drying beds before I got here – but it was a good chance to get a feel for the final stage of coffee processing on the farm. From here, the coffee will go to a dry mill where it’s rated for quality, milled (parchment is removed), packed, then finally purchased.

A Troubled Breakfast

Alejandro had to leave for the day yesterday, so I found myself alone on the farm for the morning. It gets a bit lonely up here when you’re by yourself, so I was happy to see a worker coming later in the morning and join up with him. Breakfast, though, was quite the endeavor.

The sole method of cooking here is on a wood-fired stove, which is basically a fireplace with hot plates on top. Now, I have made many fires in my life and consider myself to be a not terrible fire maker. This stove, though, is another story, and I had a fair bit of trouble getting it going.

After a couple of tries with small twigs, newspaper, and branches (all the wood is collected from around the farm) I thought I finally had a fire going, so I put a pan on to make some eggs. I waited for the pan to heat up over the flame for a bit, then cracked my egg hoping to hear the signature sizzle. Alas, I wasn’t so lucky.

This was pretty disappointing, so I tried adding more wood to get the fire going but the new branches put out the flames. I started over from scratch and scrapped the egg for a new one on try #2.

Finally, I got it! My eggs ended up way overcooked and my toast was totally blackened, but I had food for breakfast. I cut up an avocado to put on the toast and called it a meal.

Baby Trees

Thursday morning wasn’t just an adventure for me and my breakfast, though: Miguel also had quite the scare. Miguel tends to a nursery for coffee saplings in the backyard of his home in the nearby city of Armenia so that he can frequently check on them. The other day, Alejandro orphaned two new dogs to bring to the farm, and they had been staying at Miguel’s house. When he woke up on Thursday morning, Miguel discovered that the new dogs had entirely destroyed the nursery and all 3,000 coffee sprouts were flung across the ground!

Back on the farm on Thursday, sent me a whatsapp message letting me know that someone was coming to “drop off some stuff to the farm.” (At this point, I knew nothing about the seedling disaster.) About 10 minutes later, a guy pulls up in a motorcycle carefully holding a bag with 3 packages delicately wrapped in newspaper. In each package is about 1,000 baby coffee saplings, each no more than 4 inches tall with at most one leaf. 5 minutes later, a worker shows up on his motorcycle and asks me where the seeds are. I show him, and we proceed to plant the seedlings together for the rest of the day!

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Scenes from the Farm

I learned how to cook empanadas! Miguel’s girlfriend’s family came over and they’re all vegetarian so we cooked a big vegetarian barbecue. One of the main menu items were vegetarian empanadas with a rice and caramelized onion and tomato filling – they were absolutely delicious. I helped shape and cut the empanadas, which was super fun!

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Not every meal is as lux, though. In fact, the majority of meals are some combination of rice, beans, and hot sauce. I’ve never been the biggest fan of beans especially, but I’ve grown to appreciate that they’re very filling here.

I’ve also been taking some nice pictures from around the farm:

That’s all I’ve got. On the horizon are trips to coffee buying associations and dry mills, travel around Quindio, and a big blog post explainer about Raw Materials, the company that runs El Fénix.

Have a great day!

Alex