Nicaragua - El Diablo FW

We always look for consistent high impact projects for the house filter line - easy drinkers that suit a little more development than our usual style. We were impressed with the El Diablo pre-shipment samples we received from Caravela earlier in the year - setting up a drying facility that helps producers access higher incomes as delivering higher quality, as the hot and dry climate in Nicaragua can oft lead to poor drying and shelf stability. We know that we'll be able to consistently buy from this project year on year, which is a real bonus

Brew Guide:

Best Brewed with: Filter/Espresso (House Omni)

Light-Medium Roaster Influence (House Filter Omni): We take the house filter profile a touch further than our traditional "light" style - but not quite tipping into the medium-level of intervention we go for in the espresso roasts. Taking a lower altitude field blend like this

Best Rested: 2+ weeks

Filter: 62g/L, 94°C when fresh; 92°C when rested

Espresso: 18g/45g/24-28s

We're tasting: Sweet and sugary aromatics - fresh fudge, toasted pecans and stewed apples. In the cup it's rich and comforting, with pistachio cookies, melted milk chocolate and macadamia, a gentle stewed bramley apple acidity and a little black tea in the finish. As it cools becoming a little more fresher red apple & milk chocolate hobnob.

Traceability

The Story

El Diablo is a community blend assembled from wet parchment supplied by five smallholders farming around San Rafael del Norte, San Sebastián de Yalí and the wider Jinotega highlands. The coffee is bought by Caravela in wet parchment (or cherry, for their natural lots) rather than as finished green, and the drying is carried out centrally at their facility in La Concordia. The blend is named for the Cerro Datanlí-El Diablo reserve, which sits in the highlands between Matagalpa and Jinotega.

Drying coffee is a value-adding step, and the stage at which the differentiated quality that earns a speciality price can be either locked in or lost. For that reason the rule of thumb in speciality has generally held that producers are best served by drying their own coffee and retaining that value themselves, to capture as much as possible from their side of the value chain. The sale of coffee wet, at the farm gate is more usually associated with the commodity end of the trade, where intermediaries (including the infamous "coyotes") purchase cherry or wet parchment cheaply from cash-constrained growers, capture the drying and milling margin, and return neither traceability nor a price connected to the coffee's quality. If coffee is your principle source of income/your main cash crop, and you've had to wait a year between harvests to get paid - the pressure for immediate cash can be incredibly high.

On the surface what Caravela have built here looks the same as any other commodity purchasing point, but like all things coffee the devil (no pun intended) really is in the details. Caravela is buying at a price well above the local market rather than below it, paid for on delivery, so that the cash-flow pressure ordinarily exploited by an intermediary is instead offered as a service to the producer - their buying programs are free for producers to submit lots to, and they offer agronomic support as part of their PECA program. Unlike a coyote buying parchment with immediate cash and selling it to a commercial mill, exploiting arbitrage and mingling all coffees to a faceless, fungible good - with Caravela the traceability is retained to the level of the contributing producers, and the drying is undertaken to a defined standard that returns a cleaner and better priced coffee than is typically achievable across a number of separately dried farm lots.

There's two competing incentives - as roasters, we want stable, well dried coffees. We don't like the risk of a coffee fading on us, dying in transit or whilst waiting to go on the offer (or worst, really of all - during its run), so we want and ask producers to dry slowly. After all, a slow drying (perhaps under shade) protects the seeds and leaves a nice even moisture content and low water activity. But - logistics, dear boy, logistics. If you go from sun-drying your coffee on a patio in 4 days to raised beds under shade in 14 days, you've just tied up your drying area for 10 more days. You might have more coffees in-bound - the harvest waits for no-one, you've got to pick the cherries when they're ripe - and that wet coffee needs to go somewhere, they won't wait if there's no space for it. You need to massively expand your drying areas, and of course good stable coffee needs to be turned and raked and hand picked to remove defects, and covered if it's too hot, covered if there's going to be humidity and dew and suddenly - a simple request - dry slowly - actually turns out to be "invest quite a lot of land, labour and effort - and you can never ever stop". And remember - coffee as a cash crop.. someone will pay you right then and there and you don't even need to bother with any of the above.

A confounding factor - of all the coffee origins, bar a few (I'm not counting Yemen because that's a real outlier) - Nicaragua is amongst the hottest and driest. It is therefore a lot to expect producers to consistently dry their own coffee to a speciality standard. It's a country that is known - perhaps unfairly - for rich, low acidity, chocolatey cups (although it really can produce some crackers when you've got the right variety, farm setup and processing) - so the price incentive from better drying isn't really there at a producer level. Naturals and honeys excepted, drying is not so much about making the coffee better as it is not introducing defects or quality issues as it comes to a shelf stable point. If you have a speciality grade coffee, but one that is not particularly high scoring - you will not be paid more for it being better dried, but you'd be less likely to have it be rejected. And if it's rejected - well you still had to put the effort, labour and cost in to do the it the slow way.

So Caravela's model - create the drying facility, where there's the space and setup to do it right allows the producers to get paid speciality pricing, not have to worry about the logistics of slow drying, hand the risk over to Caravela, and by pooling their lots together Caravela are able to market their coffee internationally, as well as offering roasters a consistent profile. It's a model we see across central America - the centralised "beneficio" that can be incredibly powerful when deployed well, and we'll look forward to featuring El Diablo as part of our spring/summer house filter rotation moving forward.