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Speciality coffee is born and nurtured on the mountains between the tropics. Most great coffee is grown at high altitudes above 1000m on mountainous terrain and hand-picked. In order to get beans that produce good coffee, the producers need to know how to cultivate their plants and ensure that only the ripe cherries are picked at harvest.
On an estate this means ensuring that the workforce is skilled enough to nurture the plants and are paid enough to ensure they don’t cut corners during harvest. Because the cherries mature at different rates, the harvest requires several sweeps. If someone is not paid to select the best cherries, the temptation is to pick indiscriminately to get the weight up. All this extra labour increases the cost of production, but the reward for this is at the speciality market. Speciality coffee is in a different category altogether from the main commercial coffees, which make up nearly all of the coffee sold in the supermarkets and drunk in the cafes of the UK. One of the major differences is that the farmers are rewarded for their labour several fold over the commercial and Fairtrade rates reference. A lot of plonk coffee is grown on the flats, is not cultivated and is harvested by machine. However, most coffee grown on the hills is also poor quality. As with wine, there is coffee and then there are single estate cup of excellence winners and proud co-operatives that produce coffees with great flavour, richness and complexity. Coffee from one estate can be completely different from an estate on the South-side of the same mountain depending on the soil conditions, rainfall, altitude, the strain of bean grown and the attention paid to the cultivation of the plant. The coffee plantation is where the majority of the hard work goes into making a great cup of coffee. It’s only right that the great workers from great plantations get rewarded for their efforts. |
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