This coffee has been given a 92 score by Coffee Review in which Ken Davids writes: " Intense, crisp yet sweet-toned aroma with honey, cedar and rose notes. In the cup soft acidity, medium body, and a lyric, delicate complexity: honey, sweet cherry, molasses, cedar, hints of milk chocolate and flowering grass."

Juana Mamami Huanca from the San Ignacio cooperative is a first generation coffee producer. She began producing coffee on her farm at the age of 16 and now at only 23 years of age she has earned second place in the Cup of Excellence in Bolivia.

Her farm covers fifteen acres of lush hillsides in the Carrasco La Reserva region of Caranavi Province at an altitude of approximately 4,900 feet above sea-level. The farm has an abundance of shade trees. Production is carried out without the use of chemical fertilizers or pesticides but does not have organic certification. The lack of certification is typical for very small farmers: it has been beyond her means. The price we paid should go a long way towards correcting that. Certification, however, takes at least three years to get. The cup is medium bodied with a mellow sweet acidity highlighting warm black cherry, caramel and milk chocolate notes. The price is $15.00 per 8 ounces. Click here to order or call 866 GHH-JAVA.

Marco Aurelio Ortega is a very small Colombian farmer deeply attached to the earth and its life-forces. He uses only natural inputs and applies no chemicals to his farm, growing medicinal and aromatic herbs, fruits and many different trees on his tiny 3 acre farm. He has even contoured his farm on the steep slopes, at 6,000 feet, something I am told again and again in Colombia that small farmers cannot afford - yet he has done it simply because he feels that erosion control is worth the effort. Marco Aurelia will be applying for organic certification, which practices he has long applied out of his own convictions. We are looking into importing his coffee-blossom honey which he currently sells to the local market... Those are Africanized bees on his business card...

Mr. Ortega produced 6 micro-lots this past summer. They were all exemplary (we picked his coffee out blind again and again).It is 100% of the Caturra variety at its best.  Ortega's craftsmanship brings out delicate complex flavor notes of great clarity reminiscent of Burgundy. Villa Flor is a coffee that combines great delicacy with real spine. The cup has refined acidity that is all sweetness and light around a Brazil nut core, with a touch of wintergreen, mixed with tropical fruit aromas from hot to cold. $15.95 per 8 ounces.Click here to order or call 866-GHH-JAVA.

To read parts 1 through 7 of The Long Road to Quality © please click here.

Coffee farmers must weigh several factors when choosing the variety or cultivar of Arabica to grow.  The first and most important is deciding which market he is in, commercial, specialty and/or luxury; this last category is the youngest and very restricted but powerful branch of specialty coffee, since it should represent the apex of what coffees can achieve in the cup. 

Spontaneous mutations: these have occurred many times since the introduction of Typica and Bourbon around the world.  Plants exhibiting perceived desirable features were then propagated and became cultivars.  A perfect example is the appearance in 1871 near the Brazilian town of Maragogype of a coffee tree within a field of Typica that had unusually large leaves, fruits and beans.   It was later cultivated throughout Latin America and is named after its birthplace, Maragogype.  The large size of its beans made it quite popular in Europe for decorating cookies. 

Natural cross breeding:  Naturally bred crosses between cultivars and the two varieties (Bourbon and Typica) was the next step.  Maragogype was later crossed with the cultivar Pacas, itself a mutant of Bourbon in El Salvador, to produce Pacamara, a producer of very large beans and of superior quality. 

Selection criteria: cultivars have typically been selected for yield, disease and pest resistance, draught and growth habit.  Quality in the cup has always been incidental.  Nevertheless some cultivars are notable for their extreme quality. 

Yield per acre:  Low prices for green coffee have dominated the entire spectrum of the coffee market for decades and have made productivity the dominating desired trait in coffee cultivars.  The increasing urgency from our ballooning world population to grow more on smaller parcels of land has added to the pressure.  Both these factors intuitively point to the most intense agricultural practices possible; these favor flat terrains (see Farming: Where) and high yielding coffee cultivars.  Exploiting the new cultivars has permitted efficiency-oriented farmers to raise productivity three to six times what it was a few decades ago.  The plants are grown in full or near-full sun light and heavily fertilized.  High production farms completely replace their trees every fifteen years; they are exhausted.  Most modern cultivars meet this high-yield criterion, but do not have to meet them either, if grown on more organic, less industrial type farms, where the same trees can produce steadily for many decades.  Many of these higher yielding cultivars, thank goodness, also produce distinctive, very fine quality coffees in such conditions. 

Growth Habit:  Compactness of size and vertical growth habits, the latter advantageous for coffee hedges that are mechanically harvested, are increasingly important criteria.  Compact growth cultivars, such as Caturra,  are often seen on the mountainsides of Latin America.     

Disease and pest resistance have become equally important criteria since the 1970's.  Diseases and pests have multiplied and spread across the oceans, occasioning major efforts to create resistant plants.  These have almost always involved crossing Arabica with a different species of coffee tree, usually Robusta, previously discussed.  Examples abound:  the two most famous, or infamous for those of us preferring quality, are Catimor, whose progeny have spread from Costa Rica to Colombia, and Ruiru 11.   This plant was developed in Kenya to combat the dreaded Coffee Berry Disease (CBD), a highly virulent form of Anthracnose, which can wipe out as much as 85% of a farm's crop in a bad year.  Copper spraying, allowed even in organic farming, is applied as many as fourteen times a year in Kenya to control this pestilence.  A Catimor or Ruiru 11 can start out nicely enough, although without distinction, but the tail of the devil is in the aftertaste.

Draught resistance:  one of the most revered cultivars in Specialty Coffee is Kenya's SL-28 (for Scott Laboratories and the particular line selection that was chosen; I prefer to think of SL-28 as something like a special Porsche for coffee drinkers), developed in the 1930's from Bourbon for draught resistance.  Kenya has relatively low rainfall.  This grand cultivar, with a huge and distinct flavor profile, is, alas, extremely prone to CBD and farmers have been encouraged for many years to switch to the resistant Ruiru 11.   That thousands of tiny impoverished landholders growing multiple crops and situated in Kenya's richest agricultural zone might switch to a coffee that has no worth unless produced in huge quantity requiring great efficiency and high use of fertilizers seems to be of little concern.   It is to be hoped that future research, which is clearly urgent, is focused equally on quality as it is with quantity.   Kenya is a Bordeaux of coffee. 

The industry of coffee versus the quality of coffee:   The Colombian Federation of Coffee Growers which represents all Colombian growers, the vast majority of whom are small, has come up with a plan to dramatically increase Colombia's coffee production by introducing a new high production, disease resistant Arabica-Robusta hybrid coffee with, hopefully, improved quality over previous efforts.  This would catapult Colombia to being the undisputed number two volume seller of coffee in the world by 2015.  Farmers are being encouraged to pull out their old plants in favor of this one, a considerable investment for people with little to start with.  My concern - and that of my associates in the specialty field - is that while Colombia may well increase production, small farmers will not be necessarily better off because of it nor will the growing number of quality consumers be thrilled.  Colombia is a treasure house of potentially great coffees which has hardly been tapped and which could reinvigorate the quality of life for many small as well as large farmers. 

Older varieties and cultivars have a critical role to play:   What I have observed many times is how healthy even high production coffee plants are when in balance.  Higher production cultivars like Caturra and Catuai still produce more, albeit less spectacularly, than Bourbon and especially Typica when protected by shade trees and subjected to a less strenuous production cycle; they do not require heavy costly fertilizer inputs or heavy maintenance of high yield production.  Likewise Kenya is seeing the return of shade trees to protect the coffee plants below.  (We will investigate this at greater length when we examine how coffee is grown, in a future chapter).  It would seem that many ravages are due to the practice of mechanically squeezing every last drop of energy from living things with rapid exhaustion the end result.  Neither small and medium sized farmers nor high quality consumers have much tolerance for the results, one because of the cup, the other because of the pocket book.  The burgeoning quality market is saying less is far more to both sides of the equation.  

The next newsletter will list and describe the main Arabica varieties and cultivars.