Over the holiday season of 2004/2005 my wife and I traveled to Nicaragua to spend Christmas and new years with friends. My best friend, along with a couple of business acquaintances, had recently purchased a small nearly abandoned coffee plantation in the carved out crater on the southeast side of the Mombacho Volcano outside of Granada and adjacent to Lake Nicaragua. It is my understanding that they saw the land as a potential eco-lodge or other tourist type location. After many trips and much exploration, they decided that logistically it would be much too difficult to create anything more than rudimentary accommodations for campers. But even a campground would be out of the question in the near term.
So they decided to try to get the farm going again. They found a local farmer and installed him as manager in the "house". There is no electricity or running water (in the sense that most of us think of running water) and it is a long way from any kind of supplies. But none of that mattered when it came time to grow and harvest coffee and that is what they did.
So now here we are a few years later and the farm is operational and even growing. They are trying to get certified as organic and also trying to restore some of the production capabilities that are now provided by the people who buy their beans (in berry form). They have also renewed efforts to get some kind of camping facilities going, but I still think it will be a few years before anyone would ever find them.
I am going again in July for a couple of weeks and will spend some time with the new manager listening to everything he is willing to tell me about their plants and processes. I know nothing about coffee farms so this will be a real treat. One of the things I would like to do is bring back some green beans to send as samples to a few of the receptive roasters who may be able to offer any suggestions or advice. This may not be useful to anyone this year, but perhaps in the coming years it could interesting.
Here are some pictures from the trip:
This is the volcano from the south side. The mound in this picture is all "the volcano". The near-left area that is appears to be a lower elevation is the part of the volcano that blew out a-la-Mount Saint Helens.
To call the approach road a road is really a stretch, but it is the only way to get there. From the highway south of Granada, it takes about 2 hours of slow travel in a capable 4WD vehicle. We took a few detours to explore some trails and visit the lake at the end of road, but it was pretty grueling otherwise. The final portion of the road up to the farm is a cobblestone lined path of about 18% to 22%:
We slept in tents on the grounds in front of the rancho between the old pulper and the drying patio. The wind howls viciously day and night up there. It made for pleasant sleeping, but sometimes poor hiking. We hiked and climbed up through the coffee trees and the surrounding jungle about halfway to the rim.
This is basically the diametrical view from the volcano view above. This is looking out toward Lake Nicaragua. They believe many of the tiny islands that are ubiquitous in that lake were formed when the rim was blown off the top of this volcano. If we crested this hill just a few more meters, we would see the "road". All of the coffee is inside the crater but the farm extends below the lower rim for a quite a ways:
This is the "house". It contains a kitchen and a single bedroom. The other accommodations that one would normally require in a house are in much smaller building nearby which is quite breezy all the time:
And here is the kitchen. There is not much else to say other than to acknowledge that the woman pictured is one of the kindest people I have ever had the pleasure of knowing:
I believe this is some machinery used to remove the fruit from the ripe coffee berry (please correct me if I am wrong). In the foreground is the area they used to dry the beans once the pulp was removed. Our tents are just to the right of this photo:
About a 1.5 hour hike up from our camp is the genesis of all running water in the small valley below this farm. This amazing contraption is connected via galvanized pipes to close to one hundred rural homes below:
One of the pickers at work. They start early to beat the heat. He is nearing the end of his workday:
The pickers work up and down a row of plants with that basket and pick the ripe berries. When they get to the end of each row back at the road, they dump the contents of the basket into one of these sacks, We would see them in various stages of being filled up and down the roads:
We all know what this is:
The shade trees for the coffee plants mixed in with the darker coffee trees. That pipe is the same as the aforementioned plumbing pipe:
At the end of the workday, they bring the sacks back to the rancho to figure out how much was picked. I didn't catch all the details, but basically this box is the accepted unit of measure of the amount of berries that were picked:
Then the boxes are poured into other bags for transport to another location where they will be pulped and dried:
The crew.
On the next trip, I will take a whole new round of pictures and post a few here. Maybe a few less than the above.
Chris
