It Matters

From time to time people ask why I bother. Is a good cup of coffee really worth all the hassle?

Tonight brought it all home for me - tonight was the real reason why it matters, why you should demand quality and why it is important to know about the coffee we drink.

Fiori Coffee in West Perth sent an invitation out to their mailing list to come along to their roastery and hear from a coffee grower from Honduras and get his perspective of drinking coffee, growing coffee and the profound relationship that exists between the cup and the crop.

Gerardo Barrios now lives and works in Australia, but he is a 7th generation coffee grower and his family has grown coffee in Honduras for over 150 years.

Gerardo represents the new face of what we could call 'Relationship Coffee' which is in my opinion a significant step beyond 'Certified' programs such as Fair Trade, Organic etc.

The building of relationships between growers and roasters offers a unique opportunity for growers to sell directly to roasters and for roasters to ensure a supply of high quality coffee to an agreed standard.

Gerardo started importing his family's coffee into Australia to help out at a time when world coffee prices were low, and when Honduran coffee was less well known and growers suffered a price penalty as a result.

Low prices don't just create hardship for the grower. Each grower employs people to grow and plant the seedlings, care for the coffee plants and harvest and process the coffee cherries. This is not high paying work, and many of the employees on a coffee plantation are already among the poorest of the poor. The lifespan for some workers is only 50 years, and for the men who carry the heavy sacks of coffee, their later years are beset by chronic back problems as you would expect. Gerardo's family have introduced sacks that can only hold 20 kilograms of coffee to quite literally 'lighten the load' for these workers.

Low prices can mean that it is uneconomical for a grower to harvest as it costs more to harvest than they will receive for the coffee. This can have an impact at the local level and also on the regional and national level in countries like Honduras. In between the grower and the cafe the coffee will have been processed by hand several times, from harvesting to sorting and after bagging it may pass through several intermediaries, each one adding their 'cut' to the final cost of the roasted bean.

Every time you drink a cup of coffee, you are knowingly or not, participating in a process that often started with people who had very little and who get very little of the price that you paid for that cup of coffee.

Fair Trade is one effort to redress this balance, but like many 'certification' programs there are barriers and bureaucracies and in the end it depends on the value of the branding, which while it might give some assurance of cash flow, does not necessarily mean that the coffee will be any good. This can hurt the branding and create an assumption that you might buy fair trade solely to support growers rather than because of the quality of the coffee. Organic certification has a similar problem and also comes with a certification system that costs the growers some of the income they can often not afford to spend just to be able to use a label.

To put this into context, the coffee grower may not be able to process their own crop, so it will be sold for a few cents per kilo to a 'Coyote', a middleman who on-sells the coffee to a mill. The 'Coyote' will squeeze the grower as much as they can to increase their margin, the mill will squeeze the Coyote and so on. Of course the large buyers, the import and export cartels play a very big role in determining the price and by the time the green beans arrive in Australia a lot of the hard dealing has already gone on.

For a small grower, producing a quality coffee, it can be almost impossible to break through all of this and to sell the coffee at a fair price to someone who will appreciate its value and respect the coffee, and the people who produced it.

That is where a small artisan roaster like Fiori comes in. Kamran met Gerardo and over a number of years has developed a relationship of mutual trust and respect, the result of this is that Kamran has access to an outstanding central American coffee and Gerardo is able to ensure that the money for that coffee is able to be returned to where it is needed.

In turn, Fiori coffee is rapidly building on its already outstanding reputation for quality, with an equally outstanding reputation for ethical business dealing and for supporting good business and practices among growers that extend to fair wages for those who work on the coffee plantations and supporting the education and health needs of the workers.

The two leading coffee roasters in Perth have both shown this concern and it is an outstanding feature of their business. Thankfully many Perth coffee drinkers, first captured by the quality of the coffee are also tuning in the the more important message of the part they play as individuals in supporting all the hands who planted, picked, sorted and carried the coffee from the plantation to the cup.

Honduras is but one of many coffee growing countries that depend on the annual coffee crop. As the second most valuable commodity after oil, coffee has a significance in the global economy and an impact that reaches far beyond the microfoam on your morning flat white.

Yes, we want to be able to enjoy the good things in life - and coffee is certainly one of those, but our enjoyment should not be at the expense of others. I'll take that a little further and suggest that our coffee drinking should in fact contribute to the welfare of others. If you care about coffee then you should care about where it comes from and learn about those whose hands are the first to pluck this treasure from the tree.

I'm a consumer, not a coffee industry person. As a consumer however I can make choices and to echo Gerardo Barrios, while I may not be able to change the world, I can change my world.