el salvador nicaragua journal

8/9/2019 El Salvador Nicaragua Journal

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Phillipe and Edwardo do El Salvador and Nicaragua

Origin Coffee Sourcing Trip | February 2010 page 1

Day 1 - London to El Salvador

0430 I leap out of bed having not slept with the excitement of the impending trip. Clothes were laid out and bag

was packed three days ago, so Im out the door and on the road within two minutes.

0600 I arrive at Phils rents house to collect Phil. He is a little curious as to why I am two hours early (I am

generally more excited than Phil, much to his annoyance). I rush Phil through his morning routine and rebook the

taxi to ensure that we arrive at the airport four hours early - thus avoiding any unforeseeable eventualities that

we might face on our short journey from Phils rents to Heathrow Terminal 4.

0800 At the airport - Phil is not happy that we are at the airport so early

1200 We are on the plane! Both Phil and I cannot hide our disappointment at the standard of the airlines

hostesses (a theme that will roll throughout our trip)

1210 Crossword that was meant to fill a few hours of our time is complete.

1210 2200 Bicker with Phil between snoozes.

2200 - 2300 Sprint through immigration in Houston to get to Gate 1 to catch our transfer, only to be told the gate

has changed to Gate 18 at the opposite end of the airport.

2000 (Central America) It becomes very apparent how little Spanish I know at El Salvador immigration.

Fortunately we are picked up from the airport by Fernando, owner of Finca El Carmen who speaks very good

English (my Spanish did improve as our trip continued, thanks to Phil). Fernando takes us to our hotel, The

Radisson, where he leaves us for the night for binge drinking and skinny dipping after a pint of lager we call it a

night and go to bed.


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Day 2 Finca El Carmen

First view of San Salvador in the daylight - not bad!

No sign of jetlag - too excited! Phil and I meet for breakfast which is fantastic although it is accompanied,

strangely, with Indonesian coffee.

Fernando collects us and drives us to Finca El Carmen. The road from San Salvador is, Fernando informs us, the

most dangerous in El Salvador. This is quite an accolade we later find, as every road could be a contender,

although the danger generally comes from the other road users.

On arrival we are given a tour of the plantation house, a beautiful house with high ceilings. There are photos and

trinkets everywhere relating to the large family past and present with particular focus on old man Augustine,

great grandfather, founder of El Carmen and original big fish in the El Salvador coffee industry. The house is now

used by which ever family member is staying at the farm in the week. It is also where all the family gather on

special occasions.


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After a meeting about Origin Coffees goals and future plans, we set out onto the farm. Phil and I very quickly

realise that the weights and measures that we know and love in the UK are not recognised in Central America.

This is obvious now I reflect. However, we are definitely not prepared for the copious amounts of words used for

weights and measures on the farms. First and it seemed the most used is monsanes which is 7000m2. El

Carmen is made up of 15 monsanes. These monsanes are made up tavlonas which are areas/lots. A tavlona is

very important for speciality coffee as every lot is kept separate when picked and readied for processing. This is

important because each area is affected differently by its environment, which subtly affects the end cup.

The farm is made up of 75% Bourbon. The remaining varieties are made up of Catura and Pacca. The terrain

although high in the mountains is surprisingly flat. Fernando believes this plateau is one of the reasons he is able

to achieve such a high quality coffee. The other reasons would include the incredible amounts of research put

into soil, the nutrients within it, the indigenous trees used for shade and windbreaks and the way everything

affects the coffee plants. Basically they do everything they can to create the best cup!

Lunch is taken late at Jardin Celeste - an amazing restaurant! I have the chicken, Phil has the steak. Both of us

leave feeling very happy. Phil is a little happier as he is still alive after nearly being savaged by the cute sheep dog

on the way in. If you do happen to visit Jardin Celeste DO NOT touch the cute sheep dog.


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During our stay on El Carmen they are making their last run of picking. This means that all the best cherries have

been picked and the pickers are now doing a final sweep of the tavlonas with coffee left to be picked. All coffee

has to be picked otherwise it will be left on the trees, attract disease and go to waste. If the final pickings are

under ripe they are left on the patios to ripen. When ripe, they are processed in the same way as everything else.

All these lots are kept separate and sold at a lower price to local market.

Fernando suggests a French restaurant for dinner but we decline and ask to be taken to a local restaurant. A

local restaurant we get, unfortunately I dont get the name. Again, it is superb, but in a different way to JardinCeleste, which is grand. This restaurant is a room with benches which only served Pabusa, which is the local

delicacy. Its a tortilla filled with either beans, cheese, prawns or some sort of meat mixture. It is fantastic! After

dinner we return to our Plantation house - a house built for rental to tourists.


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Day 3 Finca El Carmen to San Salvador

We have breakfast in the Plantation house with Fernando. We enjoy a standard El Salvadorian fare of refried

beans, cheese, bacon and eggs with chilli - beautiful!

After brekkie we are back onto the farm to visit the mill. We are given a run through of the wet mill process and

watch it in action. The mill is particularly well set up for the speciality coffee market. There are eleven reception

tanks and eleven separate pulpers. This set up enables all lots to be separate through out the wet mill process.

At the mill all coffee from the El Carmen estate is processed. They also process a lot of coffee from other farms in

the area, including Monte Sion and San Jose.

After pulping, the coffee is washed and fermentation is started. This section lasts for a number of hours. The

coffee is then taken to the patios for drying. It is removed from the patios when it reaches 12% moisture. It is

then rested in the warehouse for about a month.

Time for lunch - off to the plantation house to meet Fernandos brother and to eat some refried beans, cheese

and chicken.


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When rested, the coffee is run through the dry mill. The dry mill is the next on the list of places we visit. The

purpose of the dry mill is to remove the husk and parchment and leave a smooth green bean! The dry process

also screens the coffee and splits it in to size - the bigger the better is the general rule.

The next stage sees the coffee searched for defects. There are two methods used to search the coffee. First is a

super high tech machine that runs the green coffee through, shining ultra violet light on it. Beans that glow are

defective and are knocked out with a jet of air (this all happens at an incredible speed and Phil and I are most

impressed). The next sorting method is much more traditional. Coffee is passed along a conveyer belt, where

women search through to pull out any defects.


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Our tour of the coffee farm is complete but Fernando is keen to show us how he had diversified in order to make

more money. The house we stay in was used as a tourist let mostly for local tourists but does get interest from

internationals. We are taken to a part of the farm where Fernando and his family grow Leather Leaf, a decorative

leaf that is produced for flower arranging and is sold mainly to Europe.

The next non-coffee project comes as somewhat of a surprise as it involves Phil and me stepping in to some

rather tight harnesses. The harnesses are, we find out, essential as they save us from certain death on a tree top

walk and then a two hundred metre descent on a flying fox. Fernando explains that this is all set up for corporateevents, team building, over coming fear of heights and something else to offer the coffee tourists that visit the

farm.

Our time at El Carmen is up and Fernando takes us back down the road of doom to San Salvador and our hotel.

We have had a great time at the farm and have taken lots of positives - the fact that Fernando is able to process

tiny lots from all over the area is most exciting!


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Back at the hotel we soon get stuck into some local beer, serenaded by the El Salvador version of Bon Jovi. Out

on the terrace there is a camp clarinettist that keeps gesturing to us with his instrument. After a couple of lagers,

Phil and I pluck up the courage to go out of the hotel complex. This isnt that brave as we only visit a mall next

door that is attached to the hotel by a bridge. In the mall we find an incredible Espresso bar, Viva Espresso. The

caf was set up by 2008 El Salvador Barista Champion, who came ninth in the Worlds in the same year. The staff

at the caf are very friendly, including Brian, who tells us that he is the next El Salvador champion. From what we

saw, hes probably right! After our expedition out of the hotel we are happy to be back with Bon Jovi in the hotel

lounge. To celebrate we have a couple of gallons of lager and play a few frames of pool (I win all of them).

Day 4 El Salvador to Nicaragua

The taxi drive to the airport is quite eventful as it appears that the driver has attached a hosepipe to the exhaust

and piped it into the cab. After a couple of miles we both feel quite drowsy but we manage to retain

consciousness and make it to the airport safely. We queue up for our flight for just over an hour only to find we

could have skipped the line as we are first class.

The flight to Managua takes an hour and we are met at the airport by Erwin and Elane Mierisch, son and

daughter of Dr Erwin Mierisch - owner of Don Estevan (the collective name for his five farms and mill). Erwin Jnr

was the director of operations for the cup of excellence in Nicaragua and Elane has recently moved back from the

states and her role was to continue her mothers legacy and take control of the community projects at the farms.

We drive an hour and a half north to Matagalpa where the Don Estevan mill is based. On arrival we are given a

quick tour of Dr Mierisch house (where we are staying) and then straight out onto the mill that is next door.

The first observation of the mill and patios is that the patios are not concrete but just a field of dusty clay. This

means that, unlike El Carmen where the coffee was dried on a concrete patio, here, all coffee is dried on

tarpaulin. Each lot has its own tarpaulin and the larger the lot, the larger the tarpaulin. The mill is responsible for

the drying and milling for the five farms that Dr Mierisch owns plus the other farms owned by the extended

family. We are to take a tour inside the mill on day five. For now, it is a lunch of refried beans, cheese, chicken,

steak and tortilla back at the quinta.


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After lunch its straight off to Limoncillo, which is an hour and a halfs drive from the quinta. The road from

Matagalpa to the farm isnt too bad until we reach the base of the mountain which is the home of Limoncillo.

The mountain road is a 45 minute drive and Erwin informs us that in the rainy season it was impassable, this is

really no surprise as it is barely passable now!

Erwin also tells us that we are visiting Limoncillo first as its the most developed of all the farms. The community

is long established. During this visit we are to see and hear of all the established community projects taking place

on Limoncillo - including Hydro Electricity, which consists of a community shop for the workers to purchase

anything they may need at cost price; stone built houses for the families who live on the farm; a medical centre

that employs a full time nurse and a doctor, who attends the centre once a week, and a school/nursery for the

workers children.


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The Limocillo farm is 300 montanes in total but probably only 200 of those are coffee producing, on average

sixteen containers of coffee come from this one farm. The range of produce is varied as this seems to be Dr

Mierischs playground. He constantly tries new things, methods of irrigation and cutting edge varieties such as

the rather scientifically named H15. Other varieties to talk about were Java Nica (nica standing for Nicaragua);

Yellow Pacamara (a strain that has only ever been found on this farm); Catuai Red and Catuai Yellow. Erwin Jnr

speaks with frustration of some of his fathers wild schemes - rather than replant small areas of unknown strains

he would plant huge tavlonas of them!


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After a great day on the farm we travel back to Matagalpa for dinner. The journey, for me, is a chance to reflect

on what I had seen in the day. The Mierisch family really do everything they can to make their workers lives as

comfortable as possible. Happy workers are productive workers. An example of this mutually beneficial scheme

is the pickers payment method. A picker takes their days harvest to the manager at the end of the day. He then

measures the harvest by using a Lata (a can of 2.5g). Each can is counted. One to three cans receives $1.20 per

can; four to seven cans receives $1.30 per can and eight plus cans receives $1.40 per can. When this method was

introduced, production increased by 100%. Because the harvest is completed faster, they save money, on things

such as meals for the workers. (The Mierisch family provide all their workers with breakfast, lunch and dinner).

A great day is topped off with a tasty pizza at the local Italian. During dinner I make an inadvertent faux pas.

After establishing that Dr Mierisch had practiced gynaecology in America, I enquire as to whether he still keeps

his hand in in Nicaragua. Fortunately, Phil is the only one who notices and he takes great pleasure in telling me

what a fool I am before we go to bed (at 9pm!).


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Day 5 Don Estevan

After breakfast (refried beans, cheese, scrambled eggs with chilli peppers and fresh fruit from the garden) we are

straight off to the cupping room at Don Estavan. We taste a number of great coffees from the Mierischs farms.

Coffees that stand out are the Natural Yellow Pacamara from Limoncillo and The Java Nica from Mama Minta. It

is also great to cup with Erwin, he gives us lots of insider tips.

Finca Mama Minta and Fica Los Altos. Los Altos is the farm that we (Origin coffee) deal with. The farm has only

just become the property of The Mierisch family and we are warned that they had a lot of work to do to get it to

the model of Limoncillo. The farm was at the top of the mountain spanning from 1200 to 1500 metres.


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The problem was that the aspect of the farm made it very susceptible to wind and the previous owner (Erwins

cousin), had not truly grasped this. He had planted a lot of Java and Bourbon - varieties that are very vulnerable

to the conditions. Dr Mierisch is in the process of pulling out all those varieties that are not producing, and

replacing them with plants that will work. He believes that out of 150 monsanes, only 40 are producing well.

They are also replacing wind breaks that were poorly placed, funnelling any wind rather blocking it. All this

replanting means Los Altos has the largest nursery we have seen.


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The coffee from Los Altos is currently wet milled at Mama Minta, the neighbouring farm. The long term plan is to

reproduce a similar model as Limoncillo but Erwin explains you have to build the community with the farm -

there is no point having the medical centre, school and dormitories if at harvest you only need 40 workers. Los

Altos is a very exciting project that we are lucky to be involved with at this stage.

We travel through Los Altos and then into Finca le Minita. Mama Minta is a smaller farm but well developed. It

has a shop and a kitchen where all the food for the workers is prepared. It also has its own wet mill. It is very

common in Nicaragua for the farms to wet mill the coffee on the farm and then take it down to hotter areas to bedried and dry milled. This is quite different to what we experienced in El Salvador, where all the mills we saw had

both wet and dry mill facilities. I put it down to the fact that El Salvador is much smaller and room is sparse. I

also believe this contributes to the way pickers in Nicaragua live onsite and pickers in El Salvador live in the towns

and villages around the farms.

With regard to the way I see the pickers being treated, it does appear that the guys at Don Estevan are doing a

better job that in El Salvador. Although in El Salvador, the workers live nearby, whereas in Nicaragua this is not

the case. This means that the workers require more looking after.

Tomorrow we are back in El Salvador at Monte Sion, which is a farm with a good reputation for looking after its

workers. I will put my theory to test!

After Mamaminta we are off to lunch in Jinotega, a restaurant called the Dog Pound. It is another restaurant that

deliveres a fantastic meal (even with a name like that)! I dont know what I expected but the food really is good inCentral America.

Feeling rather good after lunch we are treated to the final farm of the Mierisch collective (last we visited, there

was also Placeras) San Jose###. The farm is a treat, not only because it is a farm that was their best producing

farm, but it is set at 1500 metres, looking down on Jinotega and the surrounding area which included a huge

man-made lake.


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On our trip around San Jose we are joined by the future of San Jose - Axel, Genda and Brian, three boys that are

lovable rogues (after they had returned my camera and phone!)

San Jose is another great experience but we have to move on and get back to our hotel in Managua. We have to

be up at 4.30am for our flight back to San Salvador.

The evenings entertainment is laid on by the hotel (as again we are a little bit fearful of leaving the hotel after

the stories Elane and Erwin told us in the traffic jam in down town Managua). We enjoy a Nicaraguan four piece

that is a mishmash of Nicaraguan folk with the Carpenters and Queen.

Day 6 - Benficio Marantha

Everything is going to plan until we get to the hotel reception to check out. The airport shuttle is supposed toleave at 5am (this is the first shuttle available and if it is on time we will be only five minutes late for check in).

However, the shuttle is delayed because of three people, that can only be described as muppets, didnt have

any money to pay for their hotel rooms. Even Phil who is generally laid back, starts to panic at 5.30am. I, who

am generally a nervous wreck, have gone through the panic stage and I am going into shock. We eventually get

to the airport, this time we pretend to be in first class and skip the queue. We do make the plane and I only have

a little bit of wee in my pants.


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Back in San Salvador we are collected by Dr Arutiers chauffer Pedro, who takes us to the Sheraton hotel. Dr

Arutier and his daughter, Carla collect us and drive us back up the road of doom to Monte Sion.

First stop is the Beneficio Maranatha Bodega where the office is. We meet the office manager Bonita - a lovely

lady who, Dr Arutier tells us, is a lot more than an office manager. The Bodega is the heart of the business, not

only is it central to organising the whole coffee process it is also where all the community projects are based.

Toys are collected for the children of the workers and a bakery is set up for the workers to make money off

season. Phil and I are grateful for the bakery as we havent had any breakfast. In one of the rooms are two

brand new bikes that the Arutiers have bought to offer as incentives to the two best pickers.

We leave Boninta and head up the road to the nursery. It would appear that Dr Arutier is as experimental as Dr

Mierisch. The nursery is large and full of plants, all are Bourbon variety but there are lots of different strains andhalf the new plants are grafted onto Robusta root stock. He even has a strain to rival Dr Arutiers - F5. The

problem with the experimental road was evident - the 09 10 crop was 40% down on the previous. This was

partly down to a bad growing season and partly down to the extensive planting of the F5 strand not working at

altitude. It did succeed in the lower farms. They are now in the process of pulling out the bad plants and

replacing them with a more durable Bourbon strain. Because of the replanting, Dr Arutier is confident for the

next years crop.


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From the nursery we travel a few hundred metres to the mill. The wet mill wasnt used this year - the bad

harvest making it not commercially viable, so the coffee is processed at Finca El Carmen. The intricacy of the

machine is even more impressive after Carla tells us the Dr built it by hand!

We leave the mill and head up to Monte Sion. We are joking with Carla about the terrible roads we had

experienced in Nicaragua, but there we were driving in a brand new Mitsubishi Shogun. The roads to Monte Sion

are undoubtedly better but the Drs car is not! So off we bounce. At the bottom of the first incline we meet with

the police. We later learn that this was an arranged meeting and that the police were there for our benefit and

had been checking the road for bandits.

Our first stop is the community school that was donated by the Arutiers largest Japanese importer. Visiting the

school is a real treat - the children are great fun and have prepared a welcome song and painted a welcome sign

for Phil.


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We have lunch a little further up the mountain in an area where the manager lives. Within this enclose is a plot of

land put aside for development for a dormitory for seventy five people. The project has been put on pause

because the lack of funds. Carla tells us they were trying to raise $10000 to complete the work. Phil and I ask

Carla whether if we were to help raise the money she could call it Edwardo Gevaux or Gevward?

Also on the plot there is a wormery filled with Californian worms that digest the pulp from the coffee cherriesand turn it into supercharged worm juice. That goes into Dr Arutiers special fertiliser, 5 litres of super juice, 5

litres of Cal (a powder like chalk) and 5 litres of pulp.

.


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After the worms we are off up to the highest farm we visit on our trip, Shanikah, at 1800m. The farm is beautiful

with amazing views of the volcano that straddles the El Salvador Guatemala border. The Dr tells us that this

where his finest coffee, or as he calls it tip top comes from. There is no top top available this year but we will

definitely be looking to buy some of the next crop.

The Beneficio Maranatha is the perfect end to our trip, I love all the farms we have visited for different reasons,

but it is Monte Sion that really won my heart. Dr Arutier and his family are the guys who are putting the most

amount of effort into improving the lives of the people that work in the community and not for personal gain.

To end our time with Carla and the Dr, before they drop us back in San Salvador, we revisit my favourite

restaurant of the trip. It is my favourite not only because the cute savage sheep dog tried to eat Phils hand but

also because of the amazing food.

We have a relatively early night in preparation for our long trip home, but there is still time to gatecrash a local

dignitarys 60th

birthday party and fall out with a group of prostitutes.

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