2010 has seen further accolades pile up for the Caballero family. This April the coffee from Finca La Isabella, which is a part of the La Tortuga project, won the “best of origin' prize at the SCAA Coffee of the Year competition and finished 3rd overall in scoring among entries from all over the world. Moises Herrera added another plaque to the wall in taking 8th place in this year's Cup of Excellence. Moises also took the unofficial prize for best comedian during our Extraordinary Coffee workshop last June that took place in Colombia with his clever wit on the bus rides around the country, and Don Fabio….well his reputation precedes him. He is without doubt one of the most humble and lovable human beings I've ever met. We are grateful for the many years we've worked together with the Caballero crew and are looking forward to many more…the coffee just keeps getting better, and La Tortuga has slowly become one of our customers' favorite Central American coffees.

When we tasted the coffee we knew immediately that we would buy it. Another Caballero farm neighboring La Tina. La Isabella is actually the oldest of the three family farms (La Tina, El Puente, La Isabella) and has been featured in the La Tortuga project along with the coffees from La Tina, but this is the first time we're selling it on its own. An interesting aside here is that over the last ten years I've spent working on developing quality coffees there have been a few notable instances where I've run into real stand-out coffees and then on a subsequent visit to the farm found that the trees were very old and not uniformly pruned, the yields were extremely low, and the environment somewhat untended. These are hallmarks of abandoned or neglected farms. You come across these a lot in Latin America, and they stand as a sort of testament to the difficulty in succeeding as a small-to-mid-size coffee farmer. Most of the time the properties were either repossessed by the banks or sold off in a desperate situation to someone who just took advantage of an opportunity to get a good deal on a chunk of land that they will sit on as an investment. Sometimes they are inherited family farms that just fell into disrepair due to lack of interest, time, or financial resources on the part of the younger generation and have only been kept for nostalgic reasons. What these semi-abandoned farms seem to have in common is a propensity to produce great quality in the cup.

This goes against conventional and scientific wisdom in some respects. The trees don't look like a picture of health—they often look like they ought to be put on life-support. But I do really like the idea that perhaps these trees, left to their own devices for many years or decades, without much human interference, have somehow reached their most ‘natural' state and achieved some sort of balance with the rest of the environment around them that results in high quality. That notion might be a bit of romantic stretch, I know, but there is at the very least a proven correlation between yield and quality, where typically higher-yielding trees produce lower quality and vice-versa. As you know there are no absolute truths in coffee, no silver bullets or magical formulas that always lead to greatness in the cup. However I do think there must be something to the idea that having balance in nature is beneficial, and that in agricultural there is a persistent and almost irresistible drive to push the limits when it comes to productivity. Every farmer wants more crop, but at what point have we crossed the line into ‘over-production'? You can push trees to produce at peak rates, but is there an inherent qualitative sacrifice that manifests in the taste of the seeds? If so, we as an industry must build an economic model where the rewards for quality clearly and consistently outweigh the advantage of increased yields.

Anyway, Isabella doesn't perfectly fit this little anecdote, because it has never really been abandoned. But it has been worked less intensively than the others in recent years and is just now being somewhat ‘rehabilitated'. The farm was mostly planted some 40 years ago by Don Fabio and his wife, although some of the trees there date back to Fabio's father's presence and are over 70 years old! The majority of the trees are between 30-40 years old, and according to Fabio have definitely been experiencing ever-lower yields. Around 50% of the trees there are of the Catuai cultivar, with the remainder equally divided between Typica and Bourbon cultivars. It is a classic mid-sized farm---about 20 hectares total—and is East facing at an altitude of 1550-1600 meters. This particular lot has a bit of a story behind it as well (which may render my ‘aging farm' theory as a key quality factor less impactful, but there is never a perfectly simple answer anyway when it comes to agriculture. It is the interplay between many variables that is most important…). The lot was the result of an experiment that Moises put into action after learning about the Kenyan process during his visit to the ECW (Extraordinary Coffee Workshop) last year in Colombia. After de-pulping and scrubbing the coffee in the ‘desmucilaginadora' (‘de-mucilaging machine) as usual he then rested the coffee in tanks for 12 hours of fermentation, after which they were washed and then submerged in clean water for an additional day. This cold water bath post-fermentation is common in Kenya but rarely done anywhere else. Some recent studies on the method have yielded inconclusive results, but certainly there is enough mounting anecdotal evidence (of which Isabella is the latest entry!) to warrant more attention. It cannot be mere coincidence that so many successful farmers have employed this technique and found improved results.