Coffee news and miscellany

Regular readers may recall that I have done a series of posts on my experiment with growing coffee here at home. All of our trees were grown from seed collected at various coffee farms we have visited in our travels. In honor of our two cats, we named our growing collection “Finca Dos Gatos.” Past posts are:

• Growing coffee at home
• Update on Finca Dos Gatos
• Finca Dos Gatos…harvest!

Since that last post, we moved, necessitating some adjustments to our set-up. Mainly, it was getting hard to manage the larger trees. So we have given a number of them away, including a couple to people who have greenhouses. I left myself with a few favorites.

The current inventory consists of:

Recently stumped coffee tree.

• Two trees from Finca Hartmann, Santa Clara, Panama, 2008. I have already had to prune (behead) both of these, they were just getting too large. One I’ve done twice, the last time just recently; it is currently a stump. The other I did last year, and it has a lot of new growth.
• Finca Esperanza Verde, San Ramon, Nicaragua, 2009. One large tree from which we just harvested a crop of cherries.
• El Jaguar, Jinotega, Nicaragua, 2011. A yellow caturra or catuai.
• Selva Negra, Jinotega, Nicaragua, 2011. From a feral plant growing in the cloud forest reserve there, along the exact part of the trail where I saw my first Resplendent Quetzals.
• 

  A stumped tree after about a year of re-growth.

  Near Pico Bonito, outside La Ceiba, Honduras, 2011. This is a catimor that was growing at a lower elevation.

• A couple of seedlings from some of the fruit I harvested.

Some new lessons

One critical issue I ran into after the move was water. We have well water here with a very high iron and mineral content, so it goes through a water softener. With everything that was going on, I did not give this proper consideration, and after a few months of watering with the softened water, the plants really suffered. I didn’t do lasting damage, but did end up watering only with rain water or jugs of good old Detroit city water I lugged home from work.

New growth on the catimor is a nice bronze color.

We still put the coffee outside in the summer, but our deck faces west and gets sun even under the overhang late in the day. I have learned that just like the veggies started indoors, coffee needs to be “hardened off” when going outside. They need protection from direct sunlight for a couple weeks; the leaves scorch easily. After awhile they can stand more sun, but not for long periods, especially in hot weather.

Finally, they still live under lights from about September through May. My previous system used a four-bulb fluorescent fixture with 6500K blue spectrum lights. To induce blooming, I withheld most water for a few weeks, then watered like crazy, and switched out half the lights to 3000K red spectrum bulbs. Now that I have fewer trees and a nice room that gets good sunlight, I use just a single full-spectrum 60 watt bulb hanging within two feet of the trees. This is a great, inexpensive alternative, especially if you have only a few plants. The four-foot fixture provides more even and brighter light, but my southern exposure makes up the difference.

I’ve had plenty of fruit from these trees, although any given harvest isn’t really enough to roast itself. I’ve accumulated enough now that we could make a couple cups, but given that some of the green beans have been sitting in a cupboard for a couple years, I’m not sure how tasty the final result would be. Once the younger trees start producing good crops in two years, I’ll coordinate the flowering of all of them and see if I can’t do a proper harvest, processing, roasting, and tasting!

The latest pickings.

Annual recap of how much we spend on coffee in a year

Here we are on our 6th year of standardized tracking of how much the two-person Coffee & Conservation household spends on coffee. We keep track of each bag we buy, including shipping, since we purchase the majority of our coffee online. As we’ve noted, we never buy cheap, fast-food, commodity, or mystery coffee. If we don’t know where it comes from, we don’t drink it. Usually, most have eco-certifications.

I’ll cut to the case. In 2014, we bought 61 bags (54 pounds) of coffee and spent $0.46 per six-ounce cup, which includes shipping. We spent a little over $1000 on coffee (also including shipping), and the average price per pound was $19.13.

Our six-year costs are shown in the graphic below.

Over the six years our average price per pound is $19.89 and our average price per cup is $0.48.

Last year we wanted to prove that you could buy only certified coffee for reasonable prices, and indeed our year’s supply came out to $0.44 per six-ounce cup. This year, 89% of the coffee was certified, with all but one bag of non-certifed coffee being purchased in the last six weeks. The price of coffee has climbed a bit higher this year, and the availability of certified coffee — particularly organic coffee — has started to decline a little. I think this is likely due to the impacts of the coffee leaf rust fungus crisis; production has been decreasing which can lead to higher prices, and in an effort to combat the fungus some farmers have resorted to non-organic methods and have to give up their certification.

These carefully calculated, long-term results are so consistent, I think my point has been proven: it’s a myth that environmentally-friendly, sustainably-grown coffee is “too expensive.” (Of course, the willingness of people to buy the insanely expensive, poor quality, environmentally destructive K-Cups also proves that high cost is just an excuse when it comes to buying sustainable coffee.) At any rate, the results have been so boringly uniform that I was going to discontinue this exercise…although I am curious how the effects of coffee rust will continue to impact the market. If you think I should carry on for at least one more year, let me know in the comments.

Meanwhile, don’t forget that you can calculate how much a cup of coffee costs, based on the price of a bag of beans, using the spreadsheet below.

Posts summarizing previous years are listed here:

• 2013 (the year of all certified coffee)
• 2012 (includes comparison to the high price of K-Cups)
• 2011
• 2010
• 2009

Happy New Year from Coffee & Conservation.

Annual recap of how much we spend on coffee in a year

Here we are on year five of standardized tracking of how much the two-person Coffee & Conservation household spends on coffee. We keep track of each bag we buy, including shipping, since we purchase the majority of our coffee online.

Of course, we never buy cheap, fast-food, commodity, or mystery coffee. If we don’t know where it comes from, we don’t drink it. Usually, most have eco-certifications, but since we have a lot of knowledge on how to research the source of each coffee and gauge sustainability, we have traditionally purchased other coffees that we know are sustainably-grown, but did not carry certification.

Most consumers won’t go through this process, so for 2013, we decided to buy only certified coffees: organic, Rainforest Alliance, Smithsonian Bird-Friendly, or some combination. I confess, a few bags were from farms we knew or discovered did have certification, but were not sold as such.

Of our 79 bags, around 15 were duplicates, sometimes the same farm from different roasters. Sixty-two bags of coffee were certified organic, and 28 were certified Rainforest Alliance; 11 had both certifications. Five were also Bird-Friendly certified (of which organic certification is required).

Despite buying exclusively eco-certified, specialty coffee this year, we paid the lowest price per cup in our five-year tracking history. Let us now put a fork in the myth, once and for all, that high-quality, sustainably-grown coffee “costs too much.”

Here are all the 2013 stats:

• 79 bags of coffee totaling 65.5 pounds.
• Total retail price for the coffee only = $1109. This year, we moved to a more coffee-friendly community, so we were able to buy more coffee locally and spend less on shipping, just $74. Our previous 5-year average for shipping was $127.  Our grand total was $1183 for the year.
• Cost per six-ounce cup: only $0.44 ($0.41 without shipping), calculated using the common industry standard of 11 grams of coffee beans by weight per 6 fluid ounces of water.
• The average price per pound including shipping this year was $18.08, or $16.95 excluding shipping.

Previous results

The five-year average is 63 pounds of coffee a year at an average of $20.04/lb, and $0.49 per 6-oz cup, including shipping.

We are not very typical consumers in two cost-inflating ways: 1) We buy most of our coffee online and do not buy more than we can drink in under two weeks, incurring high shipping costs; and 2) we buy from an average of over 20 different roasters each year, in order to try a variety of coffees, nearly always single origin farms and frequently higher priced microlots. Had we only repeatedly purchased our favorite locally-available coffees, our estimated cost for the year would have been around $900 total, and $0.34 a cup.

Finally, ripe cherries!

This is my third post regarding my growing (literally) little coffee farm in southeast Michigan. My first post, Growing coffee at home, documented my initial attempts at germinating coffee beans I collected on a trip to Panama in January 2008, one of which flowered in April 2011. My second post, Update on Finca Dos Gatos, covered the bean development, transplanting, and other outdoor accommodations.  Here is one more update.

Panama plants

These were my original plants, which I grew from seed collected around Volcan, Panama. The chronology:

• Seeds harvested from ripe cherries in January 2008.
• Seeds germinated in May 2008.
• First flower buds: 12 April 2011, only on one plant.
• Flowers opened 25 May 2011.
• Two fruit begin to develop 15 July 2011.
• Fruit full size, but green September 2011.
• Fruit finally begins to ripen mid-February 2012.
• Fully ripe and harvested by mid-March.

The last interesting thing about this crop was that after I picked the cherries and removed the skin, I discovered that both contained peaberries instead of two flat beans. This occurs due to one of the ovules not developing, usually from lack of fertilization. Arabica coffee is self-pollinating, but perhaps this is to be expected when there are only two flowers! After the two beans dried, I noticed they are much less dense than a normal bean…nearly as light as a roasted bean. My first crop is just souvenirs.

Nicaragua plants

I have collected seeds twice from Nicaragua. My first batch was from Finca Esperanza Verde which I planted in March 2009. These germinated in June 2009, and now have their first flower buds. I have three plants and have given others away.

The second set was collected in March 2011 from El Jaguar and Selva Negra; they germinated in mid-May 2011. I’ve given away some seedlings and have chosen to keep just two plants: one from Selva Negra and one of the yellow catuai variety from El Jaguar.

In November, I performed an experiment where I provided a “dry season” for the Panama and first batch of Nicaraguan plants. I restricted water for a couple weeks, then stop watering for three weeks. Then, I watered like crazy, and began switching over the fertilizer from the Earth Juice ”Grow” to the Earth Juice “Bloom”.  Further, I swapped out half the lights in the system to 3000K red spectrum bulbs instead of 6500K blue lights (Sun Blaze T5 in four-foot fluorescent fixtures).

And sure enough, I have a ton of flower buds, which began to develop in early February. Although the first time around, the buds developed quickly, in a month, so far all the buds I have are growing slowly, and have not yet opened.

Honduras – new additions

In November 2011, I was in Honduras. This trip was not to coffee farms, as we were staying in a lowland area on the northern coast. However, there was coffee growing in the region, and I picked up cherry from a semi-tended plot owned by the Lodge at Pico Bonito that had both coffee and cacao, as well as some at Pico Bonito itself. Traditional old varieties of arabica coffee don’t grown at this altitude with the heat and humidity. I figured it must be some varietal that included robusta heritage, and Daniel Humphries identified it from photos as catimor, a hybrid between caturra and Hybrido de Timor (itself a naturally-occurring hybrid between arabica and robusta).

In Honduras, two lines of catimor are common. One is IHCAFE 90, released in the 1990s and derived from the T5175 line out of Portugal or Brazil. The other is Lempira, from the T8667 line out of Brazil.

I had a bunch of it sprout by mid-January, and gave away some seedlings, saving a couple for myself.

Cacao

Okay, this is a coffee “finca” but I had to see if I could also grow some cacao, which was growing all over the place, including outside our cabin and next to the coffee. Here are some trees at Pico Bonito with their bizarre unripe pods.

These pods are tough and leathery and often have to be opened with a machete, but animals had opened some and we were able to retrieve the large seeds. I read that they must always be kept warm and moist, so I wrapped them in damp paper towels. No long wait like coffee. By the time I got home a few days later, they were beginning to sprout.

By early December, I had little plants about five inches tall.

In order to maintain a little more warmth and humidity, I constructed a little enclosure for the three cacao plants by wrapping overhead transparency plastic around a wire bird feeder squirrel-excluder. It sits on top of a cheap, twelve-inch plastic flower pot saucer. Another saucer went on top.

I look forward to bringing the finca outdoors for the summer, when I know everything will take off; the cacao should especially enjoy our hot, humid Michigan summer.  Perhaps I’ll do one more update with photos of more of my coffee in flower, and any resulting crop.