AN UNEXPECTED LOVE AFFAIR WITH A VERY SPECIAL HONDURAN COFFEE
August 6, 2020
I arrived at Café Z at 9am sharp on a Saturday morning in mid-June. Charlie Zavalia was emptying a bucket of green coffee beans into a roaster that sits front and center of his coffee shop. The engine thundered against the hollow sound of beans bouncing around the drum and made the room feel small. We shouted salutations at one another and I immediately tucked into a double shot of espresso and a slab of carrot bread.
“I’ll wait until you finish,” I told him naively, “I haven’t been out of the house in a while. I don’t mind.” Zavalia briefly turned his attention away from a long spreadsheet where he was tracking the machine’s temperature, his eyes slightly widened, “I won’t be finished until about 4pm.”
We spoke for nearly 90 minutes—both distracted by the noise of coffee beans spinning and cracking and a coffee roaster that demands near constant attention. I walked away from our meeting feeling like I hadn’t been able to tease out the conversation that I went looking for and left the interview on the back burner.
I started thinking about my conversation with Zavalia again after reading Culinary Stereotypes: The Gustatory Politics of Gastro-Essentialism by Michael Herzfeld, a Harvard University professor who, amongst other things, studies commensality and knowledge production. In discussing nationalistic representations of food and authenticity, Herzfeld pointed out the fallacy of a culinary discourse that focuses on ‘tradition’. According to him: “food practices change precisely because they are practices, not sets of rules written in stone...incremental changes occur as one cook gives instruction to another.” Although Herzfeld is referring to a never stagnant evolution of food as it is passed from one generation to another, his point speaks to how individual ingredients can change in a single supply chain; individual ingredients change as one person passes the product to another link in the chain.
My interpretation of that process began to shift after reading a newsletter by Alicia Kennedy titled On Vegetables, in which she postulated that “vegetables tell us the truth of their lives,” and that the immaterial—the love in a vegetable garden or the trauma of a caged animal—can imprint themselves into the flavor of food. Gloria del Fogón pointed out a similar phenomenon, arguing that she must be happy when she cooks because her energy will be passed on to her diners, “The food might taste good but if I cook angry that food is going to sit heavy on whoever is eating it.” I like thinking of the supply chain in this way: food as celestial and the implication of a divine responsibility we all carry to protect its essence. Zavalia’s proclamation that there is “no such thing as bad coffee”, a phrase I have heard him repeat like a mantra and couldn’t quite grasp, began to make more sense. Individual coffee grains aren’t ‘good’ or ‘bad’, it’s the way that humans, from producer to final consumer, treat it. I had understood that from a structural and ethical standpoint but hadn’t grappled with it from a new perspective that borders on the religious.
Zavalia didn’t express this to me in such straightforward terms but I’m willfully choosing to read between the lines. We talked about his sudden love affair with Honduran coffee, slowly transitioning into the coffee world and what it means to commit oneself to their craft.
Barista Augusto Varela.
Can you tell me how you got into coffee? You were working as an accountant before.
I was working as an accountant for a large company. I always liked the idea of the café, the conversation that happens there, that mysticism that neighborhood bars have. I wasn’t really thinking about specialty coffee or anything like that but I initially remember thinking that if I got into coffee that I could improve the classic coffee that we drink here. I thought that if I really wanted to have a better product, that I would have to toast it myself. The very first thing that I did was buy a very small 150 gram roaster and then I just started doing trials at home. At the time, there were not a lot of dry green coffee beans available. It isn’t like now. You would go to a specialty health foods shop and they had dry green coffee beans which were just not very good quality.
What makes a coffee bean good or bad?
I don’t like describing coffee in those terms. I don’t believe in ‘bad’ coffee. Coffee is a natural product. It all depends on how it has been treated. The condition that it is grown in and the labor and care that goes into it really varies and changes the final product but it all comes from the same plant. Here we are accustomed to drinking café torrado. [Editor’s note: café torrado is coffee roasted with sugar and is the most commonly drunk coffee across Argentina both at home and in ‘traditional’ coffee shops]. The torrado maybe is a way of dressing up a coffee grain that doesn’t have the same properties that a specialized coffee has. But I don’t think that coffee beans are bad, they are just different qualities. It depends a lot on that process. How is the grain being harvested, and obviously, I could have this really amazing coffee bean and roast it poorly and ruin the bean or I could have a great roast and give it to a barista that doesn’t brew it properly and it can be ruined there too.
I like this idea that the chains of human contact and decisions wrapped in that chain are fragile and what adds or subtracts value and not that the ingredient itself has a defect by nature. I think we tend to confuse those things. You do use the word ‘specialty’ though, so I guess what I wanted to ask is what would be the difference between a specialty coffee and the rest?
Imagine a big corn farm. Big open plains, sun, then comes the moment to harvest and a tractor comes along and picks up everything. The whole plant. That is commercial coffee. Speciality coffee [sic] imagine a mountain, lots of trees, vegetation, a machine can’t come through and pick everything. It’s cut by hand. They are selecting the cherry that is ready to be cut. A machine cannot distinguish between what is ripe and what is not. So when you are cutting by hand, they are making sure they are only choosing what is ready and leaving the rest to continue to ripen. That is a completely different process.
How did you end up sourcing beans if you couldn’t find the quality you wanted here?
I was able to have a friend get me some beans from the United States and then I began searching for more online from the US where basically you can find whatever beans you want. I ordered a package of 15 or 20 different kinds of beans. Each package was about a pound each. And so I just started roasting them. I was still working as an accountant. In that first batch, I tasted beans from all over the world but the bag from Honduras, it just had this complexity that none of the others had. So I contacted the co-operative, asked if I could buy some and bought five bags of coffee that I kept in my kitchen. That was a learning process and I was just selling to friends and people at work.
How much comes in a bag?
69 kilos each.
Woah! Those beans really messed with your head. Why Honduras? What was it like bringing those beans to Buenos Aires?
I had never tried anything from Honduras. What has always been really common here is coffee from Colombia and Brazil. That’s usually what you heard being talked about. So it was just very new for me. It was sort of romantic. Like I said, there was a complexity that I didn’t find in other beans. In that same bag I tried a lot of beans from Africa [sic] Ethiopia, Kenya. I tried some from India and Sumatra too. In my mind, I really was stuck on this idea that logistically it would be impossible to bring coffee across the Atlantic. That felt like an eternity to me. Later I learned that logistically to bring a coffee from Africa or Central America is pretty much the same process. I wrote to the people in Capucas and told them that I was developing an artisanal roasting project and that I really wanted to have their beans in Argentina. They said yes and then I think I wrote like 15 more emails to them with no response while I was going through the process of becoming a legal importer. Once I was allowed to import, I got an answer and brought my first bags. I think if you asked José Romero he’d probably tell you, ‘yeah I remember this weird Argentine guy that bought five bags.’
So you have 350 kilos of raw coffee in your kitchen. What did you do with all that?
At first I wanted to buy a roaster but my dad convinced me to hire that out and find clients first. So I went to Coffee Town, who was the number one speciality coffee makers in Buenos Aires and they bought bags from me. I realized that it was going to be too exclusive or too small scale so I bought a coffee roaster from China. I went to Lattente and Daniel and Checha put me in contact with Ben Whitaker. He came to my house and I prepared an espresso with the beans from Capuca that I had toasted with my little home roaster and he talked to me about all the different points within the roasting process. When my roaster arrived, he came back and helped me with a roast and answered a lot of questions and taught me the importance of [sic] if you start liking something, write it down and repeat over and over again. I just kept going and had arrived to a point where I had everything I needed to open a coffee shop. I quit my job, opened up Pick & Go and started this all there. I remember the first few weeks, no one popped in to drink a coffee and I was feeling very desperate.
[Editor’s note: Pick & Go is located in Buenos Aires’ busy business district and the size of a walk-in closet with enough space for two standing patrons. The business has since expanded to a larger cafe, Café Z, as well as a space in the remodeled Museum of Modern Art.]
What was your impression of Honduras when you went?
I went in 2015, 2017 and 2019. Honestly, each trip was incredible. I was really nervous the first time that I went. Coffee is something that I learned as I went along. I didn’t study and then start. I remember arriving in Capucas. They picked me up at the airport and we drove five hours to the cooperative close to Santa Rosa de Copan. Everything was very new for me. I had already purchased from them in 2013 but all by email. We arrived in Capucas and they took me to a tasting with a table of 15 different coffees with all the protocol of a tasting and I had absolutely no idea what was going on. My sensory memory is pretty limited, so all these descriptors that a sommelier would have I just didn’t have but over time I have learned how to understand what makes a good cup of coffee. Arriving at the cooperative almost felt ominous but when I left Jose Omar said to me, ‘there is a reason you are here.’
Tell me more about this co-operative.
In coffee there is usually a long supply chain. Developing a direct relationship [sic] the idea is to take that long chain, which is wrapped up in different valuations across the chain, and leave as much as you can with the producer. That happens in all products. Look at the dairy farmers who throw out their milk because what we pay at the supermarket hardly reaches them. They end up with barely enough to pay their costs and make ends meet. So direct contact and fair trade looks to give the producer the best benefit possible. The co-operative is supported by Fair Trade which is an organization that guarantees a quality standard and a minimum price which is far more than what you find on the market which is valued by speculation and not the product or producers. And you can pay over that minimum price because it is a direct negotiation. The beans we buy, the organization says they are worth a minimum of $1.60 a pound but we might pay up to $3.00 which is nearly double. That is what this direct relationship is about, putting a price on the quality of that product and developing a real relationship. I work with your product, you work with me, and we try to find this middle ground where we both see a benefit.
And the producers, what benefits do they have besides the financial ones?
There are about 200 coffee farmers right now. They are associates and they pay to be a part of the co-op. The co-operative is an organization that helps farmers process their coffee and grade its quality. They also have a nursery with new plants and provide organic fertilizers produced by the co-operative [sic] they help deal with issues around global warming that is obviously a big concern. They give classes, professional training, there is an open university that is run alongside a bunch of different organizations. An annual competition that brings buyers from all over the world. And then fair trade, beyond giving a certification helps facilitate negotiations between the producer and the buyer.
Do you see that as a political decision on your part?
Not really. For me it is more about passion. I have a commitment to them but I don’t see this as a political mission.
How would you define that passion? What does that include?
It’s like I said, I started this because I liked the idea of that conversation and contact with people. That’s what pushed me to learn more about coffee and I realized that the coffee itself is a marvelous product. I think the two things just connected. I stumbled into specialty coffee without seeking it out and it was part of building this space where people could come to chat and connect with one another. Obviously, I want the coffee to be delicious, I want people to like it. It’s sort of like writing a book that people enjoy reading. That ability to share. For me it is about enjoying what you do and doing it with respect, love and total commitment.