The Living Black Gold

For some, it's a feeling akin to love. It's a bitter decadence — that unparalleled feeling of being absorbed by the day's first cup of coffee.

It's a feeling Americans experience often. Daily, 400 million cups of coffee are consumed in the United States alone.

For many students and professors trekking to early classes, the next 24 hours wouldn't be the same without their personalized brew. Coffee is becoming a work of art with the variety of specialty blends, roasts and origins people can select.

These specialties are purely creations of the developed world: a tall skinny latté or an extra dry Venti almond roca cappuccino with a drizzle of caramel. Many of the people who grow that same coffee have never sipped espresso.

The Perez family, for example, grows, picks and sun-dries coffee in their backyard in Nicaragua. To make the family brew, a metal pot is heated over an open fire in a clay oven. Dried and shelled coffee beans are then hand-toasted, ground and boiled to accompany every meal of the day.

For generations, the Perez family has lived in the northern Nicaraguan highlands in a nature reserve called Miraflor. It's a region shaped by volcanoes, where coffee plants flourish in the pungent black soil and consistently cool mountain temperatures.

As people in the Northern Hemisphere hold their warm mugs tenderly throughout the long, frozen months, Nicaraguan farms begin to dry after months of rain, and coffee plant flowers have transformed into ruby fruit.

It's January — harvest time in the coffee world.

INTO THE COFFEE HILLS

Last night's rain turned the dirt road leading to the Perez farm into a muddy stream. The sun has yet to burn off the mist that hugged the hills. Acres of semi-forested farmland span the countryside. On the horizon, the mountains of Honduras tower above the clouds.

Some of the best coffee in the world grows in these hills. Some say God chose this soil for coffee and tobacco, although neither are native crops. Coffee was introduced to Nicaragua as late as 1852 when the wife of a gold-seeking German immigrant first tucked green coffee beans into the soil.

Gold mining was a bust here, but a different type of treasure was discovered — a living black gold. With a relatively consistent temperature of 70 degrees Fahrenheit, volcanic earth and abundant rains, coffee cultivation spread throughout the northern mountains of Nicaragua and today is one of the nation's primary exports.

But the trail is long and complicated for coffee beans grown in the second-poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere. Only Haiti is poorer than Nicaragua; half of the people there live on $2 a day or less.

Americans are starting to embrace quality in a cup. Coffee was formerly bulked together and never farm identified. In the 19th century Folgers became a staple of every American breakfast. Starbucks then changed the American outlook in the 1990s and showed consumers a different way of serving and drinking coffee.

The United States annually imports $4 billion in coffee. More than 66 million pounds of that is certified Fair Trade. Certified labels such as Fair Trade, Organic and Rainforest Alliance are gaining daily popularity with coffee drinkers. This conscious consuming is being called the third wave of the coffee industry — a trend that comes after those of Folgers and Starbucks. This new perception of coffee brings the companies purchasing and roasting coffee closer to the lives of third-world producers.

Today, third wave, or specialty coffees, are considered artisan ingredients with a connection between growers, roasters and consumers.

The theory is that a closer relationship between the coffee farm and the final cup of coffee allows more profit to reach the small-scale grower.

In 2010, Nicaraguan coffee sales abroad totaled $43.9 million and the industry employed more than 200,000 people in that nation. To sell their commodity abroad, the Perez family joined a local cooperative of coffee growers. Fair Trade does not certify small family or micro farms, so families congregate together into a neighborhood business. The Perez farm is part of a community cooperative that is a member of a larger exporting cooperative called PRODECOOP (Development Promoting Cooperative of Las Segovias).

COOPERATIVE OF COOPERATIVES

Wilder Perez-Villarreyna, 18, pushes open the swinging wooden gate of his family's home and walks to the beneficio where coffee cherries are being stripped of their fruit for drying. He passes men carrying bulging sacks of the naked cherry beans on their shoulders. The surrounding hillside is covered with coffee plots, where each plant's boughs are heavy with red, gem-like cherries peeking out from under the shading banana trees.

This co-op and 12 others formed PRODECOOP in 1993 so small-scale growers could pool their resources to dry beans, have them inspected for quality, and eventually export them internationally. Without this organization, individual farmers would have little opportunity to sell their coffee profitably abroad.