As far as possible, Sustainable Harvest labels its coffees not just by country of origin but by region, village, or farm. Griswold's Panamanian beans come from a specific farm, Finca Bar. His Rio Coco is a "regional" containing beans from a number of small growers in Nicaragua, while "Volcan Fuego" is more like a brand, referring to beans from Guatemala's premium coffee region around the city of Antigua.
"There are relatively few great coffee growers in the world," Griswold says. "The way you find them is to 'go to source' and seek them out. That's what we do. [Every member of the Sustainable Harvest team is bilingual.] It's the only way to find out enough. When someone like Allegro [the coffee arm of Whole Foods] comes to us for exemplary certified coffees, we can show them photos of the plantation the product comes from.
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"When we find growers who meet our criteria of quality, we try to develop an ongoing relationship with them. Naturally we're tempted to try to keep them to ourselves—I used to stay up nights thinking, 'What if these growers go to someone else?'—but the importance of transparency outweighs that. Ideally, I'd like everybody to be able to go on the Web and see the people and the plantation their favorite beans come from."
Go to www.sustainableharvest.com, for example, and click on "Costa Rica Cloud Forest Organic": You won't learn just about its "sweet, rich flavor, medium acidity, and chocolatey aroma," you'll also learn that the beans are grown under medium-density multispecies forest cover at an altitude of about 3,300 feet near the Monte Verde Nature Preserve by a cooperative of over 600 farmers producing just under 500 152-pound bags each November to January harvest season.
Griswold, who got involved in coffee in the first place as part of "my own little private Peace Corps," is not content with posting information and pictures on his site for customers to look at. He encourages customers to "go to source" themselves.
One such visitor was Scott Merle, green coffee buyer for Olympia's high-end mail-order coffee company Batdorf & Bronson. Merle has been in the business for 16 years, 12 of them with B&B, but it took two days of hard physical work processing raw coffee berries this January in the mill at Finca la Manita, in the mountains south of San Jos鬠Costa Rica, to complete his connection to the trade. "It's one thing to visit a farm and have someone tell you that the berries have to be turned in the sun on the patio for two or three days, and [another to be] working yourself turning them for a couple of hours and thinking, 'Eight hours of this, huh?' It makes you appreciate the dedication of the people who make good coffee possible."
La Manita, which produces 1,200 bags a year of superpremium beans, routinely invites importers and roasters to visit the farm during harvest. Smaller operations don't have the luxury of that kind of bonding with their customers. It was pure luck that Sustainable Harvest's Griswold ran across beans from a tiny farm outside Antigua, Guatemala, called Finca el Valle a few years ago and realized he was on to something really special. He passed the news on to Whole Foods coffee buyer Kevin Knox, who had been buying beans from neighboring properties for some years.
"Cristina Gonzales is a woman in a business dominated by male old-money guys," says Knox. "Except for seasonal harvest workers, her family literally does all the work [of] producing maybe 500 sacks in a good year. She didn't have any capital, so she had to borrow to cover her costs until harvest—in a country where the interest rate is maybe 30 percent."
El Valle's entire annual output could keep Whole Foods' Allegro brand in business for about three weeks, but such was the quality of Gonzales' handcrafted beans that the company started looking for ways to make sure she could stay in business. "We made her a deal where we paid 30 percent of what we contracted to pay for her crop up front—in effect offering her U.S. rates of interest to finance her crop."
Griswold sees such focus on the concrete needs of quality growers as the key factor in maintaining and expanding their prosperity. As president-elect of the Specialty Coffee Association of America for the coming year, he has to be tactful about the pressure groups who want to leverage his business to achieve various political, social, environmental, and ethical goals: "I like to look at solutions that are outcome-based, not structural." Knox is less discreet, talking about "joyless cause coffees" and dreaming about getting coffee drinkers to abandon their attachment to anonymous proprietary blends and look instead for coffee redolent with "the taste of place."
If that sounds impossibly idealistic, remember that even Howard Schultz says he's seen the light when it comes to letting everybody in the coffee pipeline have a fair share of the take. "Success is very shallow and lonely when it is not shared," Schultz told the world's coffee magnates last month. "The rules of engagement must change. We can't allow people at the bottom to be left behind."
rdowney@seattleweekly.com
