The Job of Java

Beach Times
Friday, September 16, 2005
By Ralph Nicholson

Richard Michael Pierpont was a stockbroker on the wrong coast of the United States, so it was understandable he might need a good cup of coffee to start a job that had him trying to make sense at four o’clock in the morning.

Gourmet coffee. Black, no sugar. Everything the plant gave.

Imagine his disappointment when he retired to Costa Rica in 1990, and discovered that more than 85 per cent of the country’s coffee, and certainly all the good stuff --- grown between 3,280 to 5,580 feet above sea level --- was for export.

In those days, it was the lowlands coffee --- grown below 2600 feet --- which was used for domestic consumption.

“I couldn’t believe it,” he says. “Here I was in Costa Rica, one of the five or ten best coffee producers in the world, and I couldn’t get a decent cup?”

There was only one thing for it. In 1993 he went into coffee, completely self-taught (other than the fact he liked the stuff) and began roasting his own beans.

Today, he buys his beans from six to eight sources, all across the seven coffee-growing regions in the country, and this year his brand --- Sun Burst Coffee --- will probably sell 100,000 bags right around the World.

“I guess our business has more than doubled in the past two years,” Mr Pierpont said from his small office in Liberia, where he roasts beans in front of tourists. “It’s been like pushing a big rock, but it has finally started moving.”

No mean feat in the highly volatile coffee market, where the price can roller-coaster on nothing more than a cold snap in Brazil, or the entry of a new player, like Vietnam in the late 1990s. Or a hurricane in the US.

This week, for example, US coffee futures fell six per cent to a ten-month low following reports that nearly half the bags of unroasted coffee in New Orleans --- home to nearly a third of the nation’s supply --- seemed to have escaped Hurricane Katrina undamaged.

“It can be very volatile,” says Carlos Fonseca, an agronomist with the Instituto del Café de Costa Rica, or ICAFE. “Four years ago there was a glut at a World level and the prices went down. There was a crisis and it forced some sub-regions in Costa Rica to disappear.”

In fact over that four-year period, 30 per cent of production was lost, with between 10 and 15 per cent of the planted coffee area disappearing.

Given that 92 per cent of Costa Rica's coffee growers have less than 12 acres (4.8 hectares under plants), volatile prices can be devastating. Many farmers simply sold lowland farms because the property was worth more than what they could make growing beans. Others pulled up their plants and went into property development.

“Costa Rica is recuperating,” says Mr Fonseca, “but we don’t know how long the bonanza will last.”

ICAFE was formed by law, grouping together all the producers, mills, mill owners, roasters and distributors who make up the industry that in 2004 produced 2.7 million sacks of coffee. This year ICAFE expects to produce 2.8 million sacks. To put it into perspective, Colombia will do four times that.

“We have only been able to do that by insisting upon quality at all levels,” says Mr Fonseca. “For example, we have an agreement with the mills that they can only accept mature beans, those must be very strictly selected.”

Coffee, which originated in North Africa where they ate it as a “power pill”, is the world’s number two commodity, after oil. It first came to Costa Rica in the last decade of the eighteenth century, where history says the first grower was probably Father Felix Velarde.

Today, Costa Rica's soils, enriched by volcanic ash with a slight degree of tropical acidity, and rich in organic matter, are ideal for good distribution of the coffee plant's root system. More than 70 per cent of the country’s coffee is grown in the mountains, where Costa Rica remains the only country in the world which has issued an executive order (N°19302-MAG, in fact, of December 4, 1989) banning the production of any variety of coffee other than Arabica. (It is also one of the few places in the World where the school calendar is scheduled around the coffee harvest.)

It is increasingly the specialty coffee market — the one that carefully roasts the highest-quality arabica beans to yield richer flavor — which now claims about 40 percent of the US market. And remember, the coffee-fueled American market accounts for more than a quarter of the global coffee sales, worth an estimated $70 billion.

The most sought-after is shade-grown, sun-dried, unblended and organic, meaning, the farm has been chemical-free for at least three years, but for the purists, regrettably the global coffee market is dominated by lower-grade, unwashed arabica and robusta beans, which are combined to make some canned blends and instant coffees.

Costa Rica is no different, where much of the locally-consumed product is actually roasted with sugar --- a maximum ten per cent by law –- to add coloring and flavor lost in the process.

“It is one of my pet peeves that we send our visitors home with not one of our best grades, but the poorer domestic qualities,” says Mr Pierpont, who has set up a small roaster in his Liberia shop to try to educate the tourists.

“Coffee is only picked for three or four months of the year,” he says. “If you are not around at that time, then you won’t see it.

“So we talk to people about how it is grown, milled, picked, selected, ground and roasted.”

And for the man who wakes every morning to black coffee? His favorite brew?

“I prefer Tarrrazú, light roast, black and nothing in it.”