The Great Coffee Bean

Time in Guatemala wouldn't be complete without a stop at one of it's most important economic engines: The Coffee Bean. And I decided to give Gillian a break from the posting task for a day.

Last week with our Spanish school, we visited a working coffee farm in the town of Jocotenango, just north of Antigua. La Finca Azotea (Azotea Farm) gave us a close look at the coffee process, from start to finish along with insight into the ever-changing coffee landscape present throughout the world.

Azotea is situated in the "Antigua" coffee region of Guatemala, a country that has 7 distinct coffee growing areas, each unique in their beans' taste and aroma. While only producing the 8th highest amount of coffee in the world, Guatemala specializes in producing a higher quality coffee bean as opposed to most of the non-shade grown, mechanical-style cultivation of Brazil or, more recently, Vietnam. More on that later.....

La Finca Azotea with its "rows of beans"

The finca had a great presentation set-up showing the coffee process from seed, to plant, to processing to cup.
While our good friend Mr. Wikipedia can give you a plethora of info about the coffee process, I'll just hit on some highlights:

After 8-9 months, a coffee plant will begin to show red berries, which, in Guatemala are then hand-picked based on ripeness. In other countries that  utilize mechanical harvest methods, a coffee plant is "stripped", whereby all of the beans are picked, regardless of their ripeness level at the same time. The hand-picking obviously is more labor-intensive, but results in a higher quality harvest, and thus is typically used for specialty coffee blends, such as those exported from Guatemala.
In addition, almost all of the farms in Guatemala only utilize "shade-grown" methods, in which the coffee plants (which only reach upwards of 5-8 feet in height) are grown among trees of much taller height, thereby improving the soil's nutrient levels and thus decreasing the need for pesticides and fertilizer. In addition, the trees provide a better environment for the farmers and also help sustain the natural wildlife throughout the farm in a naturally grown habitat.

Regardless of growing method, after harvest, the red berries are then brought to a processor and the farm is paid based on weight.

Farmer bringing in a truckload of red coffee berries. Each bag is about 150 lbs.

After unloading, the red berry skin is taken off and the resulting seeds are left to "ferment"

After fermenting, the beans go throw a "wet-wash" in order to remove another layer of skin

After the wet-wash, they are laid out in rows on pavement to dry under the hot sun. A worker goes through with a wooden paddle to create those rows you see below for exposing all of the bean. These beans have one more process remaining to remove that beige parchment layer.

After all of these steps of "de-hulling",  drying and de-hulling again eventually all that is left is the "green" coffee bean, ready for roasting or transport.
The green coffee bean is either roasted on site at the processor or, as is typically the case, shipped off to another site for roasting, most likely a large importer in the consuming country.

To get a sense of how many coffee plants are required to support the world's appetite for coffee, one coffee plant will produce 6.5 lbs of red cherries. After the de-hulling and drying process, eventually you will end up with 1.5 lbs of green coffee beans which will translate to 1 lb of roasted coffee beans. Of that, 40 cups of coffee are produced by 1 lb of roasted coffee beans.  Keep in mind that 2.25 billion cups were consumed in 2009.

The final result in a long process

There were plenty of other stats that were eye-opening regarding the economics of coffee.
Because the bulk of the importing is now controlled by only a few multi-national companies - Nestle, Phillip Morris (Maxwell House), and Proctor and Gamble (Folgers) - who mostly work off the NYSE commodity pricing for coffee, the economic spigot is obviously regulated by a select few.

For every dollar that is spent on coffee by the end consumer:

The producing country receives $.16
$.08 to the farm labor
$.05 to the farm
$.03 to the exporter
$.06 for transport

The importing country receives $.84
$.64 for the importer
$.08 for the retailer

There are a host of reasons that have caused this imbalance, so if you haven't seen the documentary, "Black Gold", I highly recommend it for expanding on this inequality. Link. Granted it is filmed in Ethiopia, but it touches on the benefits of fair-trade coffee, co-ops and other progressive ideas for the coffee industry.

Because coffee is one of the top 3 exports for Guatemala, the constant fluctuation of world coffee prices obviously has had a tremendous effect on it's economy throughout the past 150 years.
In the end, when purchasing your coffee, always try and buy fair trade.

Oh, one other note. Guatemala will be receiving their first Starbucks in the next month or two. There was a very interesting article in the newspaper about how it will be received. They don't yet know how their coffee will be priced (a typical cup here at most is a buck) or how it will fit in with what already appears to be a pretty crowded specialty coffee market. But they do expect it to be successful, similar to what Starbucks has seen in its 6 other Latin American countries that it currently has operations in: Brazil,  Chile, El Salvador, Mexico, Peru and Argentia. As always "vamos a ver".

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