Farmers’ Market:
Stori bord II
Common knowledge about coffee, even for daily consumers, usually consists of hot, dark, and not burnt is a bonus. Throw in a smidgen of Juan Valdez and his donkey wandering about South America somewhere and most people are about tapped out.
A short encounter with Ben Nason, “the coffee guy” at the Presque Isle Farmers Market in the Aroostook Centre Mall parking lot on Saturday mornings, can change all that. It is enough to jump-start the intellectual juices.
So what is up with coffee before it hits your cup? Though not immediately apparent, there are some close similarities between coffee plantations circling the globe near the equator and local agriculture in Aroostook County (who knew!?). Like the conifer seedlings planted in clear-cuts here, coffee seeds are planted in nursery beds, then babied along until they are big enough and strong enough to be permanently planted. Unlike our forest products, turn-around to a marketable product for coffee growers is measured in 3-5 years rather than decades. The coffee cherries can be mechanically harvested if the fields are smooth and flat, but more often, man and donkey wander the mountainous countryside to hand pick bright red, ripened orbs that hang in clumps. Like hand pickers compared to harvester workers in the potato industry, hand pickers will be paid based on daily production and mechanical pickers receive cents/hour regardless of pounds produced each day.
Coffee is then dried, either on mats spread on the ground in the sun or “pulped” and sealed up in fermentation vats for a time to remove the flesh of the coffee cherry before they are dried and stored. Like freshly dug potatoes, once they are stable, they can be warehoused until the crop is sent to a processing facility.
In this part of the world, we end up with French fries or Tater Tots; coffee beans are hulled, polished, graded and sorted, but they are generally shipped as “green coffee” to importers.
At its destination, the coffee is evaluated similarly to the process used by vintners to select the best wines — the “cupper” receives a small brew sample which s/he “noses,” slurps, and spits. It is the result of this evaluation that determines whether the beans are blended with many other batches to make a generic brew found in grocery stores and restaurants with a bottom-less cup policy, or if they are sold as a varietal.
It is the latter, the best beans with unique, identifiable, and predictable characteristics that Ben Nason buys to roast for his personal use and to sell through Stori bord. This is also the point where Ben can pick up coffee’s narrative.
Next week, Ben’s story.
The Presque Isle Farmers’ Market contact person is Gail Maynard, who operates Orchard Hill Farm in Woodland with her husband, Stan. Their phone number is 498-8541 and their email is orchhill@gmail.com.
