doric columns shot thirty feet up into the patchy sky, strangely attached to a concrete building that seemed to be more italian fascist than spanish colonial. the interior was a study in opposites – an entryway and sitting room perfectly balanced with opera-house mirrors, louis xvi antiquities, oil paintings that would be at home in the national gallery, a kind of viennese daydream – and the adjoining room awash with plastic tables, plants potted in plastic jugs, plastic napkin dispensers, and then doors opening onto an olympic-sized swimming pool, shafts of gray light and steam. it felt quiet, sad, and strangely not grand. as if there had been a time when this kind of conspicuous show of wealth mattered to the patriarch, but now it seemed rather senseless – so why not buy a few things from wal-mart and add them to the mix?

outside french gardens extended in every direction. but again it was a disquieting sign of a bygone era, as what was once most likely an elaborate planting had been replaced by a few tropical natives, plants that ask little. peering over the edge of the esplanade – a mile deep – a graceful coffee plantation stepped down into the valley, at the base of which sat a stunning lake the size of seattle’s lake washington.

and to the left, ringed in clouds, a faint red glow that would become furnace-red and bright as the night wore on – an active volcano, right there, spewing – a constant river of fire. we were told that in exchange for a few hours of hard hiking, you can edge yourself directly next to the molten river. sans u.s. forest service, sans guide rails or government warnings. a rather dramatic visual reminder of how far we were from seattle.  

when we’d arrived [how many?] days/hours ago – the whole damn downtown of guatemala city was on lockdown – there were ak-47’s strapped to uniforms on every blasted corner – and not as décor – before arriving I had laughed a bit inside at the tales of drug lords and guerrilla attacks – I mean “guatemala” sounded civilized – right? almost like a great place to vacation, take the kids, pet monkeys, eat heavy mangos – just the name was charming and soft on the lips…

two weeks before – I’d gotten a call – vita saying: come to guatemala. a few calls were made and then we landed. very little was done in the way of organization. as this is an unprofessional study – by definition – I chose to land in guatemala without doing a scrap of research – as a kind of exercise in perception. of course five minutes on the internet would have rendered much information about political and social unrest. but I wanted to arrive completely nubile to the realities of this place – knowing I would soon lose any innocence about the world of coffee.

the proliferation of ammo and steel was the first hint – the whole time I was there I had this thin nagging cluster of thoughts – a kind of incomplete equation hanging about – we all slept like captives as if atop a great but fragile sheet of ice – nightmares – literally every night – the air sucked straight out of the overpriced hotel rooms – clammy air – the daylight brought on strange blurry head colds – the entire country seemed frightfully on edge, not like some great travesty had been wrought – but maybe more like something bad was about to happen. a thing without a source –

in conversation with a astute coffee estate owner:

“so why don’t you turn this into an agro-tourismo, build out some guest rooms, I mean, the farm is a little like eden.”

“would you want to carry the liability insurance for a bunch of massacred gringos…?”

wow. bloody hell. I guess not.

these layers of hesitation, fleeting brutal honesty, weariness, and general dis-ease wound their ways through our days and nights in this lush country. strange décor hanging on such a lovely landscape. but we had a mission. well – two missions – caffé vita was there to directly source some perfect guatemalan arabica – not just to write a check, but also to form a relationship, a long-term connection between grower and roaster. most small-scale roasters live in a world of sample bags and phone calls with stateside importers – you don’t often find them inspecting plants south of the equator. this trip to guatemala marked the beginning of many trips around the globe – caffé vita made the decision a year ago to begin to directly source a large amount of their coffee – farm-direct – no middlemen. containers had started to arrive from specific estates – piling up and stopping traffic on pike street – but this trip was less about receiving containers. it was about the people behind those jugs of steel.

I was there with my own agenda – as a modern-day stowaway. it was my charge to hit the ground and try to understand what the hell was going on in said country – the centerpiece of this inquiry and the other international adventures that follow is a – well – a table.

the table in this place was yet another collection of opposites – a grab bag of cut-crystal candelabras, delicate family lace, and wal-mart’s fiestaware series. not quite the dusty-and-romantic out of africa farm we had imagined, but indeed an immensely stimulating environment. and the kitchen was a beehive of activity.

the first cook they had lined up to work with me in the kitchen had to cancel – apparently she was a weathered older woman of endless culinary wisdom – her substitute a searingly hot local girl who had graduated from new york state’s famed culinary school the cia – a school I know well – the kind of place that turns out some great chefs but mostly creates culinary automatons who act like they hold the grail. that said – inez was adorable – and kind of cutely embarrassed by the entire operation. the time before her arrival was mainly spent learning how to make tortillas by hand with the pink-clad maid, eating pitch-perfect carnitas, drinking a kind-of-stupid amount of the remarkable local rum, and trying to converse with the folks who were arriving in waves for the dinner. a bizarre invitation in Guatemala “some gringo coffee buyers want you to come to dinner to discuss the realities of coffee – they want to know the truth – they are interested in the dark underbelly…”

caffe vita + one pot on location: guatemala from hebb on Vimeo.

to be honest – I was a bit out of my head. and not entirely because of the rum. and as the twenty or so farmers, brokers, local coffee journalists, and others began to arrive it began to dawn on me that my cue was imminent. sure vita and I had helped arrange the dinner – and we had gotten the people there – but now I had to host a meal, in guatemala, with a fairly substantial language barrier, twenty people I had never met, had no relationship to – and not only were we supposed to eat – we were supposed to have an in-depth conversation about a crop I knew little about, a political situation I knew nothing about, and a culture I knew even less about. I was in a state of more than mild terror. so I drank more. and headed to the kitchen.

 

 

2. the dinner

I will save the specific preparations of the meal for the forthcoming recipe section of this study – but the main dish for the evening – the so-called “one pot” preparation – was an ancient mayan stew – perhaps hailing from the days of el mirador –  called suban-ick. a savory stew of many kinds of dried chili (guajillo, pasilla negro, mulatto), red and green bell peppers, tomatoes, tomatillos, chicken, beef, and pork – finished with a dash of annatto seed for color. suban-ick is traditionally cooked underground, in what was called a pib (hence the name of the dish conchinita pibil and its cousins). to make a pib (I am trying to convince vita to let me build one in their parking lot): dig a large hole – line it with stones – atop the stones light a healthy fire – when the cavity is ripping hot the leftover wood and ashes are removed, maguey leaves (or banana) are layered atop and the stew is lowered down – the stew itself contained in a pouch made of the same leaves – then more leaves are piled on top – and let it stew for hours and hours. the very darling inez had done her best to “replicate” this method without the hole-digging and maguey leaf–gathering and had created this lovely sculptural headdress of a contraption. old clay pot – filled with banana leaves, bundled at the top with a belt of braided grass, apparently the type of rope you would use to hoist the finished stew from the pit – but the rope had busted during transit – and now it was taped, elaborately, back together.

the bell was hammered. and the troops filed into dinner.

 

3. hot talk

pulling back the camera – let’s dissect the situation. we were sitting in a massive estate surrounded by european finery – and I am sure the perimeter was secured. half the “farmers” at the table were mostly third- and fourth-generation guatemalan artistocracy with interests in sugarcane, cattle, beer, telecom, and god knows what else. coffee almost seemed a romantic hobby. and then we had a few actual farmers with mud-caked boots who dedicated most waking hours to the bean. this was a strange dinner party.

part of me wants to insist that this wasn’t a genuine “guatemalan” experience – that it was tainted – where were the native pickers? the farmers who had taken to the hills and waged war with the government’s death squads? but it was happening – it was/is a small piece of the puzzle of that land. it was our first trip and haphazardly thrown together in a matter of days – though the guatemala we were being exposed to was custom-tailored – binoculars formed by the exporter who had become our main host. he wanted us to buy his product, see his farms, eat with his people.

but representative or not – this was our table and it was time to start the conversation.

fair trade. a perfect beginning.

the table erupted. the exporter had much to say. so did the yale-educated granddaughter of a coffee baron, as did several of the more flush estate owners – the actual farmers were mostly quiet. the “vocal set” as we will call them ripped into the side of fair trade – denouncing it as a corrupt system, a flawed system, where often the “premium” price does little more than line the pockets of such-and-such cooperative manager. the exporter had much to say about the quality of the fair trade beans he had received in the past – uneven and dodgy – and the lack of accountability with ever-changing management structures. the more vocal diners raised voices in a passionate disgust at how the “developed world” uses their country’s impoverishment as a marketing tool – here are some of the voices I pulled from our audio recording regarding fair trade:

“the fair trade people view us as the enemy, the private farmers – they say we don’t treat our workers well, that we don’t give them housing – but many private farms care immensely about these issues.”

“the model doesn’t work. fair trade is anti-economic. in the heart it feels good – in the brain it does not. the intentions might be good, but often the results are awful.”

“you’re inefficient, you’re nonproductive, and let’s pay you more for it…”

“guatemalan people should be proud of what they do. you are fair when you make people proud. fair trade sells the image of misery and poverty – it does not sell pride.”

“when you preach quality, you will see quality. quality is the only way for guatemalans to get ahead.”

“if you took a picture of this table – this dinner – this beautiful house – you would not sell a pound of coffee – america only wants to buy coffee from the poor”

“why does this not happen more often? why do we not sit together and talk about coffee? why do a couple of crazy gringos need to come down here in order for this to happen?”

(fair trade is a controversial issue – a system that appears to work miracles in certain regions – and perhaps is less effective in others)

4. german blood. great coffee.

at 1 a.m. we were still there. drunk. feeling pretty satisfied. the conversation had been robust – and yet I was clearly at the early stages of a steep learning curve. guatemala was becoming even more of a mystery to me, and the world of coffee was getting more complicated moment by moment – vast and tangled – perhaps a bit like a boat ride up a river to see a man named kurtz. but this was the beginning of a long journey. and there was still plenty of rum.

daniel, caffe vita’s green coffee buyer in-training leaned in. “hey. we have to go see the keller farm. seriously man. the guy is kinda wacked, but he. he.” what? he was slurring. we were all slurring. “he is kinda obsessed with soil. I mean – guys – seriously” – we nodded, looked serious about the matter and passed out shortly thereafter.

daybreak.

we had one day left in guatemala. the morning had already been wasted driving around a massive, sprawling, and downright depressing farm owned by the country’s beer dynasty (gallo): sad vacant forests of trees, yellowed leaves, a ghost town of a farm. and we were worse for the wear. eyes half-closed – in a word – severely hungover. and on daniel’s drunken insistence from the previous evening we had tracked down alex keller and convinced him that he wanted to spend his only afternoon away from the farm – back on the farm – traipsing around with a trifecta of goofy americans.

the keller farm sits in a soft, golden-hued chamber in my head. it is where the guatemala adventure stops, breathes. it was an anxious, restless, confusing trip. but this farm seemed wise, learrned. perched on a hill, overlooking the valley below.

the place made sense. and it was only then that I realized that every other experience we stumbled through – didn’t. the overriding experience of being in guatemala was a bit like being trapped in a low-grade fight with a lover, not knock-down, not screaming, just two worlds not connecting, hovering, frustrated, and smarting a little. the keller farm was more like coming home, or reconnecting with that soft-eyed someone you once had the most stunning emotional tender… you get the idea.

we jumped on the back of alex keller’s truck and headed off to tour the acreage. a lush, grass-covered soccer field stretched out behind some willowy trees. “grass” and “soccer field” don’t usually belong in the same sentence in guatemala – especially when speaking of fields that are made exclusively for coffee laborers. we reached the coffee forest. and I use the term “forest” because “plantation,” “crop rows” – essentially agricultural terms – don’t apply – the kellers’ was the second farm to receive rain forest certification in guatemala and the abundant canopies that shade their coffee have earned them distinction after distinction. the coffee trees seem part of a vibrant ecosystem, the birdsong is literally deafening at times, trees soar into the sunlight, undergrowth, mid-strata – I don’t have the language of ecology at my fingertips – but it is all there, thriving.

there was a rush of fresh air in those pockets of coffee, obviously coming from the sprawling limbs of wide-crowned cedar, cuernavaca, inga, and thick-trunked oak. I think they have bars in downtown tokyo that sell shots of air – it was like that. we headed up into the higher altitudes of the farm and parked the truck. this is after I stepped into a quicksand trap and limped back to the car with a soil-soaked leg – funny enough, but if I wasn’t on an organic farm the chances of avoiding some deep and terrible rash would have been slim – I think you can actually eat the dirt on the kellers’ farm. a quick wash of the leg in a waterfall and we were off to cup coffee.

Caffe Vita Farm Direct: Finca Nuevo Vinas Guatemala 2009 from hebb on Vimeo.

this is where it could have all gotten grim – the coffee. it could have been terrible. .beautiful place. beautiful people. (to clarify: the kellers are part german but have been in guatemala for generations – they are guatemalans.) beautiful operation. they take care of their pickers. they give back to the community. they run one of the most environmentally progressive farms in central america, even treating their coffee production water by cascading the volumes through yards and yards of bubbling bio swales. and let’s stop here and thank f’kin god because – yes – the coffee is stunning. it was by far the most redolent cup we had put in our mouths during the entire trip. we had tasted bushels and buckets – an elephant’s weight in coffee – but this shined. it shined brighter than the award-winning antiguas, the much-vaunted and exorbitantly priced finca el injerto, and the other assorted huehuetenangos. it is perfect coffee.

I sat and drank more of the exquisite local rum while the boys fidgeted with numbers. in the end mike (who sits at the helm of the vita boat) and the keller’s reached across the table and shook hangs. vigorously - and now a month later a container of this remarkable crop is piled high on pike street in seattle.

the guatemalan one pot was our virgin voyage – magical – an experience as weird as it was beautiful.

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