Sipping Strong Coffee in Addis Ababa

Ethiopians take their coffee seriously. It is one of the few African coffee growing countries that appreciates a good cup of coffee as much as the international marketplace. Coffee shops line the streets. The mercado sells bulk coffee. Restaurants offer coffee in the traditional way, brewed in clay pots with spices. You wake to the aroma of many households roasting their own coffee beans for breakfast coffee. It's an exotic place. Coffee sold in bulk at the Mercado Brewing coffee... Adding spices Grinding coffee the old-fashioned way

My Trip to Arusha

For those of you that know my itinerary, you're saying to yourself, "I didn't know he was going to Arusha." Neither did I. On approach to Nairobi from Dar es Salaam, airport lights went out so they diverted the plane to Killamonjaro. After hours in the airport, they decided to put us up in a hotel for the night. So at midnight they load us into buses for the hour drive to Arusha for the "nearest" hotel. I think someone must have a deal going with the airline. Then it was back up at 3am for the drive back to catch the 6am flight. I'm a little cranky, and tired. On the plus side, it was a beautiful view of Mount Killamonjaro from the airplane. p.s. The gardens around Dar es Salaam are filled with a profusion of tropical flowers. I didn't get out to see too much more with the 95+ degrees and equal humidity.

Return to Africa

I barely made it back to the States from my October trip, when a call came asking me whether I could return in December. Word got out about some coaching training we did in Rwanda. Now, other teams were interested. Let's see, December in the tropics or rainy Puget Sound. Yes, I believe I can make that happen. This will be a whirlwind trip of two trans-continental flights, four countries, four workshops and 30+ coaching sessions in two weeks. Watch my blog. I will try to keep it updated with a few postings.

Street Scenes

People ask me all the time what Africa is like. Before I came, I wondered as well. Where would I stay? What will day-to-day be like? What will we eat? With my ideas shaped by countless documentaries, I had a distorted view of living in Africa. While pictures can only begin to tell the story. Here are a few street scenes of everyday living. Riding the bus in southwestern Ethiopia Dealing with street traffic Main street in rural Kenya Going to market in Jimma, Ethiopia

Celebrating coffee

After days of training it was time to celebrate... and in Jimma, coffee becomes a part of the celebration. We arrive to the office arranged in a traditional coffee setting (note the round pot) and a customary snack of chollo (toasted barley). The floor is strewn with long blades of a special grass and incense burns. The smell of incense mingles with roasted coffee. It makes for a mix of tradition without ceremony. Outside they are roasting lamb, two to be exact. Rather than on a spit as I imagined, the lamb is already butchered and various parts are cooked according to a preferred method. Here, a large wok-like fry pan is used for large pieces of meat. In the background you can see a pot used for a mix of organ meats (none for me, thanks). Rather than a spit-fired roasting method, a spit-like serving method carries meat to each diner. As the server comes by, you point at the piece(s) you want and they cut it to order. As you sink your teeth into the meat you taste a spiced oil (perhaps ghee) used to season the meat before cooking.

Addis Mercado

The Addis Mercado is reported to be the largest open air marketplace in Africa. A prime spot for a firsthand Addis experience. A sprawling bustle of activity, smells, noise and shops. Much more than a destination for tourist trinkets, this place has everything... food, mops, clothes, plumbing, you name it. Most of which we did not need to see. While taking in the experience was the main attraction. We also had a few destinations in mind. We ask our taxi driver where the spices are sold. He dutifully warns us of dangerous elements lurking in the market. It's best not to wander unescorted. Thanking him for the tip, at the same time we felt fine traveling in two's with few valuables. Soon, his "friend" appears telling us of the dangers of the marketplace. We should be escorted to points of interest. So our self-appointed "guide" helped us navigate. Somehow it felt like the more likely danger is the marketplace guide scam. In the end, we never would have found the spices, green coffee or requisite trinkets.

Good, Good News

Ken found out he has a card reader... and he figured out how to use it. So yes, there will be pictures with the blog entries after all.

Time is on my mind

It is 1:15, Tuesday morning, 26-Meskrem-2002. Everything is different in Ethiopia, especially time... Local Ethiopian time starts when the sun rises, making for some interesting differences as the sun rises across the country with a difference of 45 minutes. The calendar, the Ge'ez calendar, has 12 months of 30 days each, with one short month of five or six days depending on leap year. New Year falls sometime in September (about three weeks ago). Their year started counting seven years after the conventional western calendar as it took a cleric that long to reach this part of Africa to spread the news of Christ's death. So they started when he got here.

Good News and Bad News

So I've got some good news and some bad news. First the good news... I am getting some amazing pictures as we move through the coffee growing countryside of Kenya and Ethiopia. Experiencing the sights, sounds and food of this journey is truly a unique and gratifying opportunity. Now, the bad news... I never downloaded my camera utility. Doh! So for now, I will be using images from my last trip or those I can grab along the way. There still great pictures that I hardly had a chance to share. So, just as in Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom, these images, whether actual or created (substituted), depict authenticated facts. Apologies if you might have seen an image or two from a slide show. Don't despair, when I return in a few weeks I will create links to the appropriate blogs with new highlights.

Kenyan Coffee

We spent a week in Nairobi observing training, touring coffee farms and watching the processing of coffee cherry. It is the beginning of the harvest. Farmers are just beginning to bring cherry to the mills. During the height of the season, farmers can make daily trips to the mill. At this point, it may only be several trips per week. Kenya has a strong reputation for high-quality, specialty coffee. Much of their coffee undergoes a washing process, that produces the high-grade arabica coffees highly prized in today's specialty market. Large coffee plantations operated in Kenya since early in the 20th century. Due to coffee prices, corruption and political struggles over the past few decades, coffee farming has fallen on hard times in Kenya. Many farmers neglected their trees or worse, pulled them out as the prices did not justify the cost. While coffee prices have recovered from the lows of the late 90's, yields have not. The collapse of the coffee market started a downward spiral. Farmers who couldn't cover their costs went out of business. Many who grew up during those hard times saw no future in coffee. We drove through towns of abandoned shops. The agronomist I rode with told me how many moved to the city and now struggle in Nairobi to make their living. To break the cycle, farmers need to see a future of increased incomes that come from higher yields and a quality coffee that commands premium prices.

Return to Africa

For those of you following my Africa Adventures, there will be a second chapter. After weeks of proposals and planning, we have our itinerary set. Next week I return to East Africa to implement an evaluation plan for the Coffee Initiative's training program. You may remember, I was a volunteer working for TechnoServe on training programs for coffee farmers. This trip, I will be developing an evaluation plan for those training programs. I will be based in Nairobi, Kenya, with field work in Kenya, Ethiopia and Rwanda. So watch this space. I will keep you updated on this second phase of my adventures.

Street Scenes

Scenes from everyday life in Africa offer endless fascination. It is an endless parade of people and images seemingly out of the ordinary. Sometimes curious, often busy, sometimes inexplicable.

There's the informal corner market I pass on the way home from work every evening. Local woman gather to sell produce from their plots. It's a quick spot to pick up tomatoes, cabbage, passion fruit and tree tomatoes. Muzungas (white people) like me tend to be as much a curiosity for them as their produce is for me.

Locals cultivate seemingly any level, spare lot around town. During my time (January - March), crops were harvested and replanted. Here, inter-cropping of dried beans, dried peas and corn were planted. Everyday I passed a woman tilling and planting this half acre size plot by hand. Just one of many plots I pass.

City centers like downtown Kigali consists of this veneer of office towers and western shopping centers fronting a bustling scene of real commerce. Traffic clogs these back streets as trucks offload into small, open shops. Better prices can often be had with a bit of hard-bargaining. A daily haggle for moto rides has taught me the art of pricing.

And then there are the unsavory aspects of how food can sometimes be handled. More often in rural areas, but sometimes even in the city meat hangs from a hook in open air stalls. Produce can sit on the floor of a shop selling motor parts and hardware.

A display of their wares on offer adorn many store fronts. A sight I find charming. This is rapidly changing as cell phone companies advertise for customers by painting shops, many shops, in their corporate colors. Countryside small towns often become a collage of repeated corporate-themed logos as dominant companies go head-to-head for customers.

Learning to Taste

Learning to taste coffee, or technically, learning to cup is an involved process of training your senses in all the nuances of coffee. It consists of many intensive exercises to training the palate. Our quality advisors were about to embark on a disciplined journey of taste. They were to be schooled in the exercises of standards, of similarities and of contrasts. Anyone who worked at Starbucks for any length of time was schooled in the art of coffee tasting. It was a romantic ritual which began every meeting, became the focal point of training and taught us the finer points of our product. It taught us that coffee could be more than a beverage. It could be a way to connect, to reminisce, to tell stories. Cupping coffee on the other hand was business. Cupping was about flavor, and quality, and defects, and roast. Cupping coffee is a disciplined routine of evaluation around the flavor characteristics of coffee. It attempts to standardize or instill objectivity into the squishy relativity of taste. Those of us lucky enough to work in supply chain saw the business of cupping, and its place in selecting specialty coffees. Yet, I don't think I ever appreciated what it took to learn the craft. And so, traveling half way round the world, today I spend a morning getting a glimpse into the training of quality advisors. Quality advisors are the folks working with farmers and staff to help them understand what maintains coffee quality and what creates defects. Cupping puts objectivity to the characteristics of taste (sweet, salty, sour and bitter), flavor (chocolate, blueberry, , etc.), aroma (floral, spice, citrusetc.) and body (light, medium, full). Developing a common vocabulary around these paramters and then calibrating the team on those standards is a rigorous practice. First there are the standards. Standards which bear more resemblance to a chemistry experiment than coffee. Small vials with tinctures of vanilla or essence of caramel. And graduated cylinders for precise formulation of solutions with phosphoric acid or glucose.

Next there is the preparation. Time spent describing equipment specification and precise instructions of operation. Plus, the sharing of tips for executing these routines with consistency. It takes a certain kind of person to run a tasting room, and perform the tasks in a flawlessly identical way day after day. Incidentally, that device with a series of chambers is a sieve for separating particle size. Used here for calibrating the coffee grinder, it is borrowed, I might add, from soil science (once again, grad school pays off).

Finally, there's coffee. Dozens of glass cups each with their roasted coffee stand ready to be brewed. Multiple samples per coffee give repeatability to allow for sample variability. Piping hot water, just off boil, is added to the fresh, ground coffee. As the samples steep, each is sniffed for their aroma. Then grounds are removed, and the slurping (and spitting) begins.

Training quality advisors and calibrating palates is a long process. Some experts spend years honing their skills. My brief morning is but a glimpse into their world. It's a world of routine and precision and quality that brings you that fresh cup of coffee every morning.

A Trip to the Wet Mill

High-quality, specialty coffees require special processing for the unique flavor qualities to come through in the cup. One aspect of processing is how the "cherry" pulp on the outside of the bean is removed. Wet-processing is the preferred method for many high quality coffee. In Africa, Kenya has a long history of producing washed coffees. Many other countries do not. This field visit took us to an established wet mill in Kenya.

The process starts with the farmer bringing their ripe (hopefully)cherry to the receiving station. Here, they weigh the load and the farmer gets a receipt for what was delivered.

From there it is dumped into a hopper. All of the hoppers, tanks and conveyance channels are arranged along the slope of a hill. This allows the system to be gravity-fed. With a bit of assistance from water here and there, it all flows down hill.

At the base of the hopper, a grinding machine forces cherries past grinding blades adjusted to strip the pulp and pass the bean. Most cherries contain two beans (except peaberries). The beans pass down these channels while the pulp is carried away for composting (hopefully).

While the pulp is stripped away, a thin layer of mucilage still coats the bean. It's that slippery stuff that prevents you from picking up a tomato seed. In this type of mill, rows of tanks hold the beans while fermentation breaksdown the mucilage.

After standing for the right length of time, the beans are "tested" to see when they are ready. One test involves prodding the heap with a stick to see whether the hole stands up when the stick is removed (sorta like a toothpick in the middle of a cake). Another, rubs beans between your hands to listen for a distinctive rasping sound.

Once "done," the beans are then released into washing channels. In addition to washing, these channels are used to sort tainted beans. Infected beans or those that did not develop properly are less dense, floating to the surface. "Floaters" are washed down the channel, allowed to float over the top of weirs. The denser high-quality beans sink. These beans are agitated counter-current in the channel to leave a clean bean, or parchment.

Parchment is screened at the end of the channel. Wet

parchment is carried to drying beds to air dry on screens in the sun. Dried parchment is then collected up and stored in the warehouse where it is bagged to await shipping.

Nairobi, Kenya

Nairobi is as much a western city as you will find anywhere. From its big city skyline and street-clogged traffic to its cozy restaurants and urban sophistication. With more than its fair share of big city problems, I was warned of crime and violence. I was admonished to take drivers everywhere and don't be out alone after dark. What did I find? Again, Africa surprised me. One the one hand an abandoned estate behind our building had homeless people living in psuedo luxury with overgrown ponds. On the otherhand, I found some creature comforts.

Rwanda's food scene consists of African buffets with rice, plantains, beans, cooked greens and a meat (usually goat). Weekly is fine. Anymore, wears on you. It's short list of fine dining is limited to a pizzeria, the occasional Chinese food and pasta. We survive on the ever-present brochette (kebabs, usually goat) and chips. After more than a few weeks in Rwanda I was ready for big city restaurants. Right about now I could go for a fresh Thai chicken salad and a crisp Pinot Gris served on the patio. And so I did. Simple becomes more delicious when you've been living on the basics. With more than a few trips to the food court of my local mall, I had my fill and could return to the basics.

Besides restaurants, the best thing about Nairobi is the National Park. Situated next to the city and on the jetliner's approach to the airport, it's an amazing expanse of open plains. I can't say as though it felt like wilderness, it was certainly something more than a trip to the zoo. A bit like being mixed in with the animals. Despite the steep fees, cumbersome paperwork and lack of a map, it was still well worth the hassle.