Golden rolles out the red carpet…

TV’s Golden Girls make a surprise appearance at Golden on October 31st.

Blanche event spent some time serving some customers, mostly just to chat up good looking men of course.

A very successful Halloween celebration at Golden!

Golden rolls out the red carpet yet again, this time the Rockettes. See them perform at the NAC on Nov. 15th

The Synessification of Wellington

I’m excited to announce that Paul & I will be Synessifying Wellington this evening!  This will bring us up to 90% Synessification, and with Richmond going online early next week we’ll be 100% at long last.

I’ve had a number of thoughts rattling around my mind the past few days with regards to what this transition means to me and what I think it means to us as a community.  I’ll save those for next week – for now I’d simply like to invite everyone to drop into Wellington for an incredible espressso or latte next time you’re in Wellington West!

…just not all at once please!

Canadian Barista Championship

Just a quick update on the Canadian Barista Championship while I have a brief moment of time -

Cliff and I are in Vancouver this week for the annual national championship.  Today was the first round, with 15 extraordinary baristas presenting.  Cliff gave a solid performance, improving on many scores over his 2nd place regional finish.  Although he didn’t make the finals (which is quite a feat in this competition — Canada is a serious playground when it comes to coffee!), Cliff did manage to win the All Canadian Latte Art Competition at Cafe for Contemporary Arts in North Vancouver.

The finals are tomorrow (Thursday) starting at noon PST.  The top 6 are some of the best baristas in the world, each possessing their own unique skill sets and styles.  It should be very close.  You can watch the finals on ustream to see who will represent Canada at the 2010 World Barista Championship in London next April!

http://www.ustream.tv/channel/2009-canadian-national-barista-championships

A Visit to Finca La Estrella, Jinotega Nicaragua

Flora del Socorro Montenegro Blandón and her family operate Finca La Estrella in Nicaragua’s Northern department of Jinotega.  We had the opportunity to visit Flora’s farm the other day, hosted most graciously by Soppexcca, a cooperative based in Jinotega of which Flora is a member.

The road approaching Finca la Estrella. We had to walk part of the distance as the van couldn't traverse the road.

Flora has met with tremendous success with her farm, placing 18th in the first ever Nicaragua Cup of Excellence in 2002 and 4th in 2004.  Her 2004 auction lot, an 18 bag (about 2400 lb) selection of the best coffee her farm produced that year, sold for $5.00/lb.  The coffee was described by the international jury members by the following descriptors:

“Expansive, layers of flavors, very sweet, jasmine, velvety, floral, juicy, sweet acidity, well balanced, good at all temperatures, smooth body, cantalope, spicy, chocolate aftertaste”

Mmm, sounds nice!  When we arrived at the farm we had an opportunity to sit down at the farmhouse with Flora and ask her a number of questions about farm life and what winning the Cup of Excellence meant to her.  We enjoyed hearing about how she used the money from selling her amazing coffee for such a high price to invest back into her farm, her community and her cooperative.   Sadly, the only thing she declined to comment on was the secret to winning the Cup of Excellence!

Flora and her youngest daughter

After our chat we were served a delicious lunch of fresh tortillas, cheese made on the farm and chicken vegetable soup.  It was very satisfying alone, but what topped off the experience was being served coffee from the farm by the hands of a woman that has actually won the Cup of Excellence!  Incredible!

After lunch we took a tour of the farm.  It’s a beautiful high altitude farm producing mostly organic certified coffees.  One of the most striking memories I have from this tour is the risk farmers must control when growing coffee organically.  Although harvest has not began yet, we did find the odd cluster of ripe cherries near the road.  From one cluster of maybe 7 or 8 ripe cherries three of them were infested by “la broca” – the coffee berry borer.  The representative from Soppexcca noted that it’s possible for a farm to lose up to 50% of its crop to a very bad broca infestation.  For most farmers trying to manage thousands of trees, placing a broca trap like those we saw at Selva Negra on every 6th tree just isn’t feasible.  This isn’t to understate the risks associated with conventional pest and fungus controls, but it really made me aware how important it is for those of us on the consuming side of coffee to be aware of the added costs of growing organically and to pay an appropriate premium for it.

It's not quite harvest time yet!

We did find a few ripe cherries...

Here you can see the damage from the broca, complete with fungus and larvae. Severely insect damaged beans and fungus damaged beans cannot be present in "Specialty Coffee".

Organic coffee farmers rely on biodiversity to control pests like broca by maintaining an ecosystem with natural predators.

Here's an image of a sound coffee bean freshly picked with cherry and parchment removed. It's white because it's very very wet and needs to be dried before mold sets in!

Flora's youngest daughter - awww.

Until next time, Jinotega!

Selva Negra Workers’ Fair

Each year Mausi and Eddy Kuhl, the owners of Selva Negra, host a fair for the workers of their farm as well as for farmers in the surrounding region.  The purpose is to celebrate community, to get to know each other and to share ideas.

The fair took place in the Selva Negra workers’ village where there were booths set up like one would find at a trade show, each dedicated to demonstrating an agricultural practice or skilled trade deployed on Selva Negra.  These ranged from varieties of coffee plants used, crop husbandry implements, safety tools for non-organic farmers, organic agricultural tools and methods as well as various arts, crafts and textiles. The fair was a full energy event with a dance competition and a DJ with some impressively loud gear.  It was a little surreal to hear the latest hip-hop tracks blasted across the hills accompanied by geese and howler monkeys in the harmony section as the workers huddled around cheering each other on  in a wheelbarrow race and a slightly racier dance contest.  The main event was a team challenge involving climbing up a 20 foot pole completely covered in lard to grab a ribbon out of a bin at the top.

Nom nom nom

Images of a cutting edge sustainable coffee farm

On the final official day of Let’s Talk Coffee a great number of participants went to Selva Negra, an award winning estate farm in Matagalpa, partly for a tour of that wonderful place but perhaps moreso in search of an appropriate place to say goodbye until next year.  I briefly outlined some of the innovative practices this farm is deploying, but I’ll use this space to go into more detail.

The sign marking to entrance to Selva Negra along the highway heading North from Matagalpa towards Jinotega. Matagalpa is the southern most of the signifant coffee growing regions in Nicaragua (along with Jinotega, Nueva Segovia and Madriz).

Coffee is carefully grown behind natural wind barriers to protect the trees from damage.

I think the farm is about 1,500 hectares of which 30% is a natural wildlife preservation. As demonstrated here, the coffee is grown under multiple layers of shade canopy.

Several varieties of coffee are grown on the farm. I believe this is Java Typica, and they also grow Caturra, Yellow Catuai and Pacamara.

Happy to be surrounded by coffee and to have an excuse to wear a sweet hat.

Green cherries with a "Broca trap". Broca is a borer beatle that digs a hole into the bottom of coffee cherries and proceeds to eat the insides while making the cherry a home for its offspring. The Broca trap is a natural pool of Broca attracting liquid that can drown 5-6 a day.

Harvest doesn't begin until next month. Some cherries are ripening early, but the bulk will ripen between November and January.

The farm has a laboratory where they cook up all sorts of natural agricultural aids, such as this fungicide derived - I think - from lemongrass leaves.

Once the coffee is picked it is dumped in this large collection tank. The angles were selected to allow coffee to flow into the wet mill with minimal water.

There are four pulpers in the wet mill. These are used to strip the fruit from the beans inside. After, the coffee is channeled into fermentation tanks where it rests for 12-24 hours to allow the mucilage to break down.

The farm captures methane from coffee pulp and human waste to use as a power source.

The farm produces all of its own vegetables, fruit, cheese and meat. It is used by the 250 permanent workers, temporary workers during harvest and at the ecoresort hotel/restaurant.

Selva Negra and the kick off for Let’s Talk Coffee 2009

Selva Negra is a unique, award winning estate coffee farm located in the hills of Matagalpa, Nicaragua at about 1500m.  I spent five days there over the past week participating in the Q Grader Training as part of Let’s Talk Coffee 2009 and would like to share a little of the experience.  I’m a bit behind on blogging because there is just so much going on down here – but I’ve managed to find some time this afternoon in between the many presentations by coffee luminaries and production innovators that help define this special event.

More on Let’s Talk Coffee later – for now I want to write about Selva Negra.  It is recognized as one of the most sustainable organic coffee farms around, and as I discovered from meeting people who had visited the farm decades ago it has been quite renowned for some time.  The sounds and vivid surroundings that visitors experience there are rarely paralleled in the coffee world.  Dense rainforests with more species than can possibly be counted are interspersed with carefully tended coffee fields.  One roaster and I counted 13 species of large trees alone in our immediate area at one point.  There is a constant serenade of bird calls often paired with the booming laughter of howler monkeys – the loudest mammals on the planet.  At night the noise of the crickets makes one think they are sitting in an Imax presentation of the latest in surround sound technology.  The area is properly known as a cloudforest, and one of the more striking memories I have is the layers of cloud cover occasionally giving way to views of the surrounding lush, green mountains.

One participant in the events pointed at that Selva Nega is like a throwback to Feudal landholding as the property features a town of I believe dozens or more permanent families.  There is a school, a carpentry and metalworking shop and all of the other necessary utilities.  The families that live there are constantly involved in maintaining the farm’s infrastructure and carrying out innovative agricultural tasks such as harvesting algae and fungus for increased compost and fertilizer productivity, laying Broca traps (for beetles that attack coffee) and deploying natural fungus resistors like lemongrass leaf infusions.

I didn’t get to see too much of the farm despite the fact that I was there for 5 days because I was involved in an intense “Q Grader” course that involved 10-12 hour days of sensory testing.  The purpose of the “Q” as it’s called is to calibrate members of the coffee supply chain from producers to importers to roasters and even retailers.  We completed I believe 22 tests of varying degrees of difficulty and it was a tremendous learning experience for all.  At the same time a number of national champion baristas from Hungary, Canada, Mexico, Costa Rica, Nicaragua and Brazil were staying on the farm and living as the workers do.  They were part of the “Seed to Cup” challenge, charged with picking and processing enough coffee to compete in a barista competition that will be held in a day or two.  For more on that check out The Seed to Cup Challenge.

We’ll be going back to Selva Negra on Sunday to do a proper tour, and I’ll have more to talk about with regards to coffee production then.  For now I’ll share a few photos of the farm that I’ve taken so far.

Bridgehead Waste: The Tour

Pam found a hair spray can in a heavily contaminated compost pile.

On August 27th a number of Bridgehead managers, enviro reps and interested employees took a field trip out to the garbage, recycling and compost facilities where Bridgehead waste ends up.  The first stop was Lafleche composter and bioreactor. We learned what makes good compost, specifically a low level of contaminants. The most important thing we took away from the experience was the importance of careful waste streaming, making sure that only true compost ends up in the bins.

Next we toured the Goulbourn recycling facilities, where we learned the importance of choosing sustainable packaging that is easy to reuse and recycle, such as the four litre milk jugs used in store. We were impressed with their facilities and the new strides they are taking to make everyday operations more environmentally friendly. Once again, the more precise we are at separating types of recyclables, and keeping it free of contaminants, the more effective recycling is.

Garbage isn’t generally something to feel good about, but it is good to know that our garbage stays local, rather than burning fuel to send it out of site and out of mind. Additionally, the bioreactor breaks down waste at a much faster speed than conventional facilities.

Both tours were highly informative and fun. Thank you to everyone who participated.