Part Two, Quality Control: A Series on Our Partnership with Mayan Harvest
By Corazon Padilla, Director of Quality Control & Corey Turner, Director of Coffee Production
Quality Assurance and Quality Control
Oftentimes, it is believed that cherry picking is the most important part in coffee production, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Every step is important in ensuring the quality of production. We learned about depulping, washing and drying of the coffees from various farmers. All farmers in Bella Vista had their own wet mills on their property, and the final product they sold to Mayan Harvest was green coffee still in parchment. That’s where Froilan Roblero comes in. He’s the Head Green Buyer for Mayan Harvest, and is also Rosalba’s cousin. Froilan has an incredible attention to detail. By picking up a handful of green coffee and rubbing it with his hands, he can tell you the approximate moisture content of the beans and how many more days it needs to dry before being bagged. He can also smell green coffee beans and tell you what variety is in his hands.
Coffee Cherry Anatomy. In the wet process, the outer skin and pulp are mechanically removed. The beans are then put into a fermentation tank to remove the pectin layer. Coffees are then dried with the parchment still intact. The parchment helps protect a bean from drying too quickly.
Many farmers come to Mayan Harvest to sell giant sacks of green coffee, and every bag is inspected before it is accepted. This requires an inspection of a full representative sample from each bag. Dennis, who is Rosalba’s husband and is also a part of the buying team, created a contraption that can get a sample from the bottom to the top of the coffee sack without ruining the bag itself. If a bag does not meet quality standards, Mayan Harvest must decline that bag, and they return the sample. However, the conversation doesn’t end there; they give farmers suggestions on better sorting and show them an example of what they are looking for. Farmers then have the option to re-sort the rejected bag and give it to Mayan Harvest for another inspection. Some farmers will go through the extra labor to re-sort the rejected bag because the price they will get for the coffee is worth it, but other farmers will proceed with selling their coffee to another buyer for a lower price. Many of these farmers come from a far away region within the Bella Vista Municipality, and organizing another trip to Mayan Harvest and re-sorting would be too costly and time consuming.
Froilan assessing bean quality
Each sack is opened and speared with this contraption that pulls a sample of coffee from top to bottom without puncturing the bag.
Maintaining a high standard for quality can be challenging. Froilan has had some really difficult conversations with farmers, some of which are friends and family. One of his friends got really angry with him and asked, “why can’t you just buy the coffee as it is? It’s good enough.” It’s not a good feeling knowing you have to tell someone that their work was not of high enough quality, especially when you know people need the money to feed their families and maintain their livelihood, and you know how much labor went into producing their coffee. But Froilan has had to stay firm on his decisions, insisting that there is too much at risk for him to let quality slip. There is a lot of trust built between Mayan Harvest, coffee importers, and coffee roasters, and accepting anything below their standards would break that trust. He also knows that coffee from Bella Vista is really good, and that people are already doing the hard work, so why not push just a little more and produce the best product possible?
While we learned a lot about farming and quality standards, it was also rewarding for us to be able to share some of our expertise. All too often, farmers and producers don’t get to taste their coffees, and one of our favorite parts of this trip was cupping together with the QC team of Mayan Harvest. We tasted various lots of coffee and talked about their quality in depth, and discussed whether or not a coffee met their standard and where coffees fell on the flavor spectrum. However, we avoided saying whether or not a coffee was good for two reasons: we wanted to remain as objective as possible, and we didn’t want to influence the standards they set for themselves. We know what kind of coffees we like and what our customers will like, but the flavors at Andytown may not be what their other clients prefer. We focused on calibrating our palates and sharing tools and tips for quality assessment.
Because of the coyotes we mentioned earlier, it is incredibly valuable for farmers to be able to tell how well their coffee holds up on the cupping table, because that can directly determine the price they get for it. If they have tasted their coffee and know their quality standards in production have paid off, they have extra confidence to negotiate higher prices and not take any of their partners-- not just coyotes-- on their word alone. If roasters come to origin just to say whether they like coffees or not, it’s useless in the long run for farmers. Calibration, on the other hand, allows farmers to recognize desirable and undesirable qualities in their coffee for themselves.
Sorting and evaluating green coffee
Stay tuned for more reflections our our time with Mayan Harvest in Bella Vista, Mexico!
