The Taste of Many Mountains

by Bruce Wydick

Angela

  September 4, 2007

  JAVA JOE’S, ONE OF THE LEADING COFFEE IMPORTERS AND roasters in the San Francisco Bay Area, was also one of Gustavo’s favorite buyers. He had given Angela and Sofia their contact information. The Oakland company served a large niche of a large market: the coffee shops and retailers around the Bay Area and Northern California. They imported green coffee originating from both conventional and fair trade sources. One of their preferred coffees: arabica hard bean, cultivated between 5,000 and 6,500 feet above sea level in Huehuetenango, Guatemala.

  Not long after their return to San Francisco, Angela and Alex set up an appointment with public relations manager Ellen Bintz to visit the roastery.

  Upon their arrival, Ellen greeted them cordially and gave them a brochure about the firm that had lots of colorful coffee bean pictures. She was interested but a little puzzled about the research project.

  “You’re doing what now?” She looked at them with an overproduced smile.

  Angela glanced at Alex and then she stepped in. “It’s a project we’re working on for our master’s theses that’s part of a larger research project with some of our professors. We’re, uh . . . following coffee beans all the way from growers—in our case, peasant growers in Guatemala—down the chain all the way to the coffee shop. We’re trying to figure out where the profit is going.”

  “You are the next link in the chain,” Alex interjected bluntly. He had told Angela that he suspected that too much of the profit was ending up with the roasters, and he was turned off by the contrast between the abject poverty he had recently seen and experienced throughout Guatemala and the shiny new facility with the plush espresso bar they were visiting now. His disposition was as gray as a day in Amsterdam.

  “Well, we’re honored to be so.” Ellen obviously didn’t get the public relations job for nothing. Unfazed by Alex’s demeanor, she responded, “That sounds like a very ambitious project.”

  “Well, yes, I suppose it is,” said Angela. “But we are working off a grant from the US Agency for International Development that is trying to determine the impact of fair trade coffee on how coffee profits are distributed along the value chain. I think they’re hoping to redistribute some of the profit back to the growers. No offense to your company, of course.”

  “No, of course, none taken,” said Ellen, still smiling unctuously. She led them to a large warehouse that was adjacent to the office. Burlap coffee sacks were piled up on pallets twenty feet high in the warehouse in several rows, each at least thirty yards long. A white-collar employee wearing a loose tie and a pocket protector stood with a clipboard talking intently to a blue-collar man in a hard hat, who was the operator of the forklift parked next to the enormous wall of coffee.

  Ellen walked the students over to the white-collared man and waited patiently for him to finish his conversation. He obviously didn’t want it interrupted by a pesky woman from the public relations office, and so he continued his directive to the man in the hard hat without acknowledging her. It was something about the order in which he wanted the pallets stacked.

  After the extensive limit of Ellen’s patience was reached, she was forced to politely interrupt. “Jerry, these are two students working on a coffee project.” Jerry turned a mildly annoyed gaze in her direction, and Hard Hat ambled back to his forklift. “Angela and Alex, this is Jerry, our import manager.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Jerry,” said Angela, and Alex smiled. The three shook hands.

  Jerry warmed up a little. “Welcome to our roastery, guys.”

  “From where is all of this coffee?” asked Alex.

  “Well, all over the place, frankly. Comes in from everywhere to the port just down the street, gets unloaded, and we truck it over to the warehouse and drop it over there,” said Jerry. He took them over to the coffee, where they could read the burlap sacks that colorfully revealed the coffee’s origin. “Right here we have our Sumatra, in this stack our Bolivian,” he said as he slapped a bag of coffee. “Over to the left, some Kenyan . . .” Alex could see the ornate logo printed on the sack. “Over here we got a little Ethiopian . . . found him hiding between the pallets . . . stowaway.” Jerry thought this was a hoot and guffawed at his joke.

  Angela wondered how a guy like this survived in an ethnically diverse place like Oakland. “Any Guatemalan? . . . Er . . . coffee, that is?” she asked.

  “Yep. Right this way.” He led them two aisles over and about thirty feet down to several pallets stacked with Guatemalan coffee. “Got your Huehuetenango hard bean arabica from western Guatemala.”

  “We were just down there,” said Alex.

  “In Huehue?” asked Jerry.

  Alex nodded. They explained the project.

  “Some of the best coffee in the world if you get the right plantation. Grows at about 6,000 to 8,000 feet. Fruity, juicy aroma in green form. Sweet, but acidic. Almost like mangoes or lemons. Makes a great French Roast.”

  “Why the plastic bags?” asked Angela offhandedly.

  “New trend in storage and shipping for high-end coffee. Vacuumed plastic bags make the coffee taste less like a burlap sack when you drink it,” said Jerry. “Subtle, but it’s there. Don’t care about the cheap stuff, but if I’m paying a twenty-dollar premium for some specialty coffee, I don’t want it tasting baggy.”

  “That could make sense,” agreed Alex, nodding with eyebrows raised.

  Jerry continued. “Also, you get this thing called ‘container rain.’ Get dew that condenses on the ceiling of the containers from temperature changes outside and the moisture in the coffee. Stuff drips down into the product. If you got a container on top of the stack in the sun, coffee practically starts brewing all by itself on the cargo ship on the way over. Turns a shipping container into an oversized coffee pot. Makes a big mess. Ruins the coffee. Can’t happen with vacuum bags.”

  “Furthermore, one time some moron in a chemical suit from the United States Department of Agriculture fumigated my entire container of coffee with insecticide. Made some specialty Indonesian arabica taste like a can of Raid. A burlap sack is no barrier against that kind of stupidity. If I could find that guy again, I’d ring his freakin’ . . .”

  Before Jerry could fully define the manner in which he would physically punish the USDA official, Ellen thanked him and ushered the students toward a back hallway that led to a large room. It was the roastery. A half dozen coffee roasters looked like large steel drums.

  “Angela and Alex, this is Gunter Erhardt, our head roaster.” Gunter wore a laboratory coat and was hunched over a control panel. With his back to them, he quickly lifted a flat palm with fingers touching neatly together toward the group, motioning them to hold off as he finished calibrating one of the temperature dials on his equipment. After a few disconcerting moments, everything seemed to be adjusted. Gunter turned toward the group and, dispensing with formalities, got down to business.

  “Let me give you a short background on ze woasting process,” he began, pronouncing the word with a guttural h like “wwhrhrhoasting.” Alex and Angela glanced at one another. Gunter looked like a mad scientist in a B movie. To complement his look, he had a magnificently strong German accent, was of unidentifiable age, wore thick spectacles with black rims, and had wild, uncombed hair that was a mixture of gray and its unidentifiable original color. He wore a white lab coat with a cloth name badge that read “Erhardt.” Angela hadn’t noticed other employees wearing this kind of formal identification.

  “Woasting,” he began, “is essential to creating drinkable coffee because heat is required to convert the carbohydrates and fats in the bean into aromatic flavor that is craved by the discriminating American coffee consumer.” He paused awkwardly for a moment, though Angela wasn’t quite sure why. “When the beans come to us in the green form, we run them through the hopper to screen out particles, debris, and little rocks that are mixed with the raw green coffee product. After undesirable matter is filtered from the consumer product, we begin the woasting
process.”

  He paused again, expressionless, inspecting the reactions of the two students closely through his thick spectacles. Although she was genuinely interested in what Gunter was saying, Angela bit her lip to suppress a giggle. He began again. “During the process, beans are heated in drums stationed to my right and your left . . .” As Gunter continued with the lecture in an expressionless monotone, Ellen motioned her hand toward the ovens in an elegant, rolling gesture like a female assistant on a game show, apparently to add a little levity to the presentation. “. . . to temperatures up to 500 degrees Fahrenheit by the flamer of the natural gas,” he said with a straight face. Nearly losing her composure at this moment, Angela’s last resort was to raise her hand with a comment.

  Gunter called on her. “The roasters sort of look like clothes dryers,” she observed.

  “Yes, in fact zis is not a joke, but rather an ashtute observation!” he declared in a loud voice that was alarmingly close to a yell. “The coffee roaster operates under the same physical principles as the spinning clothes dryer, keeping the beans in motion during the process to prevent the beans from burning up.” He made one of his awkward pauses again and then continued, “First, the roasting drums are preheated and then the beans are heated for anywhere between a few minutes and one-half hour. At 350 degrees, the ‘first crack’ happens at about seven to nine minutes.”

  “What do you mean, this ‘first crack’?” asked Alex.

  “It is when the coffee bean makes the little pooping sound from an exothermic reaction as moisture escapes from the interior of the bean.”

  Angela whispered to Ellen, “Did he mean popping sound?”

  “Yes, I believe so,” she whispered back.

  Gunter ignored the whispering taking place in front of him. “At this point caramelization of the sugars inside the bean commences, which gives the beans aromatic flavor. If we remove heat at this stage, the beans would have New England roast, the level most preferred by—if I may dare to say so—the least discriminating consumers. More roasting yields a Full-City or American roast. Roasting even a few more minutes produces Italian roast and, still a little longer, the French roast with bolder, smokier flavors.”

  “Once my father has described this difference to me,” said Alex. “He said it is like one making a choice between Grace Kelly and Sophia Loren.”

  Gunter stared at Alex with a blank face and considered this thought, perhaps not altogether certain of the depth of the allegorical meaning. “Yes . . . quite an interesting . . . eh . . . metaphor.”

  “So how do you make decaf?” asked Angela.

  “To create the decaffeinated coffee, we remove the caffeine by soaking beans in methylene chloride. Unfortunately, the methylene chloride bonds with and takes away some of the flavor too, an outcome that is currently technically unavoidable.”

  “What about instant coffee?” inquired Alex.

  Gunter was clearly repulsed by the very idea of instant coffee, but seemingly did his best to repress all negative emotion as he responded to the question. “To make the instant coffee, roasted coffee beans, often the cheap, low-quality robusta beans, are ground into small particles that are mixed with very hot water, creating a coffee concentrate. After freeze drying, what remains are the instant coffee crystals coffee consumers scoop into their cup. For the record, we do not make the instant coffee here.”

  The final question regarding instant coffee appeared to be all Gunter could bear for the day, and he seemed eager to get back to his dials. Ellen showed them how the roasted beans were stored in large bins and then sent through one of two large machines, from which they exited in one-pound or five-pound vacuum-packed bags. This was the final product that was shipped to retailers and cafés throughout California and the West Coast.

  She then led them out of the roasting room and answered a few final questions.

  “What price do you charge coffeehouses for your beans?” asked Angela.

  “We charge $5.25 per pound for fair trade and $4.15 per pound for the standard coffee,” said Ellen. Alex was about to make what Angela anticipated was a highly inappropriate remark and she interrupted.

  “Thanks for the tour,” she said, heading to the exit door with Alex before he could share the fullness of his thoughts with the tour guide.

  “Good luck with that project of yours,” said Ellen, waving.

  “Did you listen to that one?” said Alex, disgusted as they headed down the sidewalk to Angela’s car. “For the pound of beans that these guys sell for $5.25, they pay we know only $1.48—what Gustavo and everyone like him can get on the free market. So we find that markup over costs for growers like Fernando is a little over 20 percent, markup at the fair trade cooperative level is 15 percent, but the markup at industrial roaster level is over 250 percent!”

  “I know. That’s a lot. But it must be the competitive price,” Angela argued.

  “It may be a competitive price, but it still means rip-offs.”

  “But they wouldn’t be able to charge that much if they were making extraordinary profits. The market wouldn’t allow it,” Angela contended.

  “What do you mean, ‘it wouldn’t allow it’? It is allowing it.”

  “That’s exactly what I mean. The roasters must be just covering their costs after they pay for machinery, electricity, the rent or mortgage on their facility in this area, salaries to their employees that are enough to get them to work for their firm, health care costs, and everything else. Look, this is a competitive market. If one roaster were making an extraordinary profit by charging high prices, another one would undercut their price. This would continue until any abnormally high profits among the roasters were driven out of the system.” Angela felt confident about this. How could profits remain high in a competitive market? Free entry would make them disappear in the long run.

  “Perhaps they are colluding?” Alex suggested.

  “You can’t base your analysis on conspiracy theories. You’re essentially suggesting a cartel exists between hundreds, maybe thousands of coffee roasters. I know there are the Chicos Grandes that Gustavo talked about. They may have some degree of market power in retail sectors that they dominate. But we’re not talking about Choc Full o’Nuts; we’re talking about Java Joe’s, a reasonably sized roaster in our area, but one that faces serious competition for its product all around the western US. I just don’t believe a secret cartel like that can exist.”

  “Angela, have you read the report by Oxfam several years ago during the coffee crisis, accusing the roasters of market manipulation and grower exploitation? This is not something people are now making up. During the 1970s under the International Coffee Agreement, producers received about 20 percent of total income in the world coming from coffee, and the consuming countries got ‘only’ a little over 50 percent. But listen to it: after the collapse of the ICA in 1989, the share of income to the producers of coffee fell to about 13 percent, and the income from coffee in the consuming countries increased to more than 75 percent.” Alex had apparently been reading up on this.

  Alex continued, “And you know? When world price of coffee dove by nearly half during the coffee crisis, retail prices of coffee only decreased a few percent. If markets are as competitive as you say, how can this happen? It doesn’t make sense. It is obvious that there is something smelling like fish going on.”

  Angela thought about this for a while. “It may be that costs are simply higher in the developed countries, and these costs that occur from the roasting phase forward make up the majority of the costs of delivering coffee to the consumer. May come from differences in the cost of people’s time between those who live in rich and poor countries, also from other added costs like workers’ compensation and health insurance. Are you arguing that the workers should be paid less in the processing facilities in Europe and the United States? Should the companies drop their health insurance so people can buy cheaper coffee?”

  “But why should differences in these costs have grown so much o
ver the last twenty years?”

  “Just supply and demand. The increasing margins of the coffee roasters also have to do with market forces operating at the levels of the consumer and the producer. We know the ICA held up prices artificially, encouraging surplus coffee production all around the world. Then you have the growing costs of labor in the rich countries, where the beans are processed, and a steady increase in the demand for coffee since the early 1990s. All of this adds up not to some kind of price-fixing conspiracy by roasters, but to worsening conditions for growers, and more value added at the roaster and retailer levels. And a lot of these increasing margins must be going toward higher labor costs in the form of wages and benefits.”

  Alex changed the subject. “What is that pamphlet in your hand?” he asked.

  “It’s a list of all the cafés in the Bay Area that serve Java Joe’s. I picked it up on a table in the waiting room. Check these out: the Java Lounge, Kind Grind, Jumpin’ Java, the Blue Danube Coffee House. And some of these are near campus in the Richmond district in the city.” Angela paused.

  “Alex, right here we have it—the last link in the chain.”

  CHAPTER 22

  The young woman watched anxiously while the baby slept peacefully at her side on the colorful blanket in the hay. How could such innocence exist in a world of such reckless and pitiless hatred?

  Across the village she observed that the lieutenant was growing angrier with the people in the church. It seemed they would not come out, and he was threatening them. Through the crack in the barn wall, she saw a military vehicle drive up and stop in front of the lieutenant. Another soldier carrying two large water containers jumped out of the truck. He talked with the lieutenant, and the lieutenant made some hand gestures toward the church. The soldier then began to sprinkle the water around the outside wall of the church. He also sprinkled some of the water on a cloth and tied the cloth around a stick someone had fetched from the forest. It then became clear to the young woman that what was in the containers was not water. If Pastor Juan and his followers would not come out of the church, then the lieutenant would burn the church down.